The crazy easy way to pick the right template for your website

Know what you need and what you don’t

The plethora of options available to you can make you think that you need a theme with more – more features, more pages, more sliders, more gadgets. This is wrong on several levels.

First, having too much information on your website is confusing. Your site has a purpose – whether that’s signups to your email lists, phone calls, or direct sales through the site, nothing should distract from its essential reason for existing. Do people really need a Google Maps widget showing the physical location of a store that only works online? No, but that won’t stop some site owners from embedding one.

Second, all the bells and whistles can slow your site down. This makes for a worse experience when people use it – nobody likes a website that loads slowly. Why make it less pleasant to use your site just to add things that you don’t really need?

Make sure it works well technically

This is the part of the process that many new site owners think they won’t be able to test. However, there are a few technical issues that you can clear up by yourself – and very easily, at that.

The first of these is making sure that it displays properly and looks good on different devices. Open up a link to it on your phone or tablet and see if anything goes wrong. This is called responsive design, and it’s often quoted as a vital part of modern website design.

Another test you can perform yourself is opening the template in multiple browsers. This is another important way of making sure that its technical specifications are up to par.

What maintenance is required?

This is a close relative of point number two. If the template requires a lot of technical tweaking and you don’t know how to do it, then managing your site can become unnecessarily stressful. If, on the other hand, you find it simple to add or take away content and elements as you need to, then this is a template that you can rely on, one that will make your site management as simple as can be.

Is it well-supported?

Every website eventually runs into some problems that require help. It’s the nature of the problems that they face. If you downloaded a theme for free, then you probably don’t get support with it.

You need a responsive, caring support team to make sure that your site is always shown to everyone in the best conditions.

Does it look right?

This is, when all is said and done, the most important thing to worry about when you create your site. Does it look the way you imagined it – and if not, can you change it to make it look that way?