I realized years ago, when WordPress themes weren’t nearly as advanced as they are now, that even back then, by using a theme I could make a better website faster. Not only that, since the site it is built around a theme, the content of the website is separate from the design. What this means, is that when the current look gets outdated, I can simply switch the theme without loosing my content or starting over from scratch. Now that is amazing for me as a designer, and for my clients too, because it will save them thousands of dollars over the life of their website. To any new business or even an existing one, saving money like that is a big deal.

Using themes in combination with the WodPress plugins that are available for WordPress, gives you as a web designer access to just about anything you need,  so you can meet or surpass your clients needs every time.

Once you begin to realize the incredible benefits of using a theme for your website, the next thing you may realize is that there are thousands of themes out there. I can tell you from experience they are not all created equal, so how do yo know which one to use?

Choosing The Best WordPress Themes

There are some very important points to think about when choosing a theme, let me share with you my personal techniques for quickly choosing the best WordPress themes

Tip # 1

The first important point is similar to what I talked about in my WordPress video Tutorial series regarding choosing the right plugins. You want to use the themes that have literally thousands of other people using them, because whoever designed that theme, will be highly motivated to keep updating it and improving it. This is critical so that it can continue to function properly as the internet, browsers, and WordPress itself changes over time.

This concept may seem counter intuitive to most people, because it feels like you would want an original theme that no one else is using, definitely not the one with 10 thousand other people using it already, but in reality, the internet is a huge place and there are over 60 million people using WordPress. So 10 thousand with your theme isn’t even a drop in the bucket.  Not to mention, that when you get the theme you will customize it and change it. By the time you change the logo, and the fonts, and colors, and textures, and layouts, and adding your pictures and your content, it truly does become unique.

Tip # 2

The second most important thing is customer support. You might remember that we talked about this when we discussed different tips for choosing a web hosting company(link to web hosting) and how vital it was in that case as well. If you are using themes to build sites for yourself or even for your clients, you must have strong customer support, because you will always encounter new challenges and having that support to help you solve problems efficiently is a must. You will have to  buy premium themes to get this level of support, but usually they will only be around $35-$40, a small price to pay for the luxury of having someone to help you when your stuck.

Sometimes you may encounter a problem that could take you days to find and fix. Since the customer support team or the developer themselves, deal with their software every day, they might be able to give you the answer in only a few minutes. This will help to keep your website running smoothly and if you are building websites to make money, it will save your clients money too.

How & Where To Find The Best Themes

Now I’m going to show you my top two sources from which I get the majority of my WordPress themes that I use for my personal websites and for my clients.

1 – Themeforest

The first is a website called Themeforest which has thousands of great WordPress themes. Having thousands of WordPress themes to choose from is wonderful, but can also quickly leave you feeling really overwhelmed and waste hours of your time looking through thousands of themes only to leave you more confused in the end.

To prevent this from happening to you, I’ll show you my method for quickly finding the best themes based on the criteria that I talked about earlier.

When on Themeforest you will want to navigate to the section for WordPress and select it, Then chose the type of site you are going to build, for our example lets say its a blog/magazine.

Once you select the type of website theme you want, you will be taken to a  new page and you will see that there many many themes and usually about 15 more pages full of themes to choose from as well. That would take a long time to go through them all. The default sorting for these results shows the newest themes first.

When a theme is new, it wont have many sales and that doesn’t mean it isn’t good, but for my clients, I have to be sure that what I’m using is time tested and solid, so I reserve experimenting with new stuff for my personal projects.

The trick to sorting through all these themes to find the best ones quickly:

First you need to sort the search results. Use the feature in the upper left of the theme category page you are currently on to sort the themes in this category.

Select Sales, to sort them by sales. When you do this, You will get a list of,  in this case Blog/Magazine themes sorted with the highest selling theme at the top.

Look at popup previews  layouts that fit what my client has described to me already or something that matches what I may have in mind for my own website project.

Lets say I decide to select a theme that from the preview looks pretty good and then select it.  Once I’m on the page for that theme, there are few things I’m going to focus on.

I’ll definitely check out the live preview, but before I even do that, I’ll look at the number of purchases and the comments. I might even read through the comments a little to see what type of problems people have been having and to get a glimpse of how the developer handles the support requests. Then I’ll look further down the page to see when this theme was created. After that I want to see what software version it is compatible with for WordPress. Next I’ll look at the date of the most recent update to see how long it has been since the last update

The theme pictured here in this post did check out and I would consider using it if I were doing a project that it would work for.

2 – Mysitemyway

Next I want to show you current favorite themes that I have pretty much as of a few years ago, started using almost exclusively on all the sites that I build for my clients.

The reason I love these themes so much is because the interface and options they give you, it is truly amazing. The styling and short codes are so clean and beautiful, and most importantly, they have the absolute best support of any theme developer I have ever used, and that pretty much seals the deal for me.

What I’m able to do for my clients with these themes is unbelievable right out of the box, Eventually you will learn a little CSS and HTML and when you combine that with the built in features here, there are no limits to what you can do.

These themes by MySiteMyWay are my first choice, but if I am doing a project that needs a different look or layout, I can look on theme forest or else-ware. Most of the time I us these themes because I feel like they enable me to give my customers the highest quality product.

I’ll be showing you a little bit of how these themes work in a future tutorial, but for now,  I just wanted to show you the tools I use and recommend as well as my methods for selecting great themes efficiently.

Need More Help?

We can walk you through the process of choosing the best WordPress Theme for your website step by step

The art of choosing the perfect Website Theme is covered in detail, as we walk you though the process step by step in our HD video WordPress tutorial series:  How To Make Money Building Websites 101

How to choose the right web hosting for a website, is a conversation that I often have with my website customers and students. Since I started building websites years ago, I have used just about all the major web hosts at one time or another, either for my own sites or the ones that I was building, managing, or search engine optimizing for my customers.

Like many things online these days, trying to make a decision by comparing these different companies can be difficult. Most web hosts promise similar things but say them in different ways making it hard to get an even standard of measure to use in evaluating which on is best suited for your website.

There are many different web hosting companies that are good and overall most larger companies will have a fairly good hosting package for you, but that being said, there are some very important factors that I have found to be critical to the success of your blog or website both now and in the future.

Important Factors For Choosing A Web Hosting Company

Customer Service

I am listing customer service and support at number one because to me this is one of the most critical parts of what I am paying for with a web host. As your site grows this becomes more and more important. Imagine if your site was down and you were unable to contact people at the web host to help you? Having your site down for any time at all becomes a much larger issue when it is your sole source of income.

When choosing a web host, be sure you check to see that they have various ways you can contact them 24/7 such as live chat, toll free phone, email ticketing, etc. You also want to be sure that when you do contact them that they will be abel to help you find the solution to your problem quickly.

Lastly, something that has been a great help to me, is that some companies such as my favorite hosting provider Hostgator will even move your websites for you if you are switching to their hosting services from a different host or upgrading to a higher hosting package with them.

Tech Specs

When evaluating a hosting company for technical specifications, the first step is to look closely at the website that you are moving or intending to create. It is important to look at what it will be presently and also what you want it to grow into in the future. Different hosting companies specialize in different things. If you are building a WordPress website then there will be some companies who specialize in that and if you are wanting to have robust e-commerce site built on the Magento platform then other companies will be able to address the unique needs of a site like that.

It isn’t necessary to go to a web host that specializes in a small niche, but it can be worth looking into in some cases. The most important thing, as mentioned before, is to look at your site and understand what it needs now and in the future and be sure the web host you choose has those options available for you.

Room for Growth

Having a clear long term goal for your website is vital in choosing a web host company that can grow with you or allow your site to move up from one level of service to another easily to meet its growing needs. Most websites that are just starting out will only need the basic hosting pack available just about anywhere, but once the site starts to grow you will be very glad that you looked into this before hand.

More than once I have been working on websites for my customers who had the site built on the cheapest hosting they could find. Not only was it much harder to move the site to a new host because there just weren’t the right options for growth with the original host, but what they didn’t know was that every dollar they saved by using a cheap host, they probably lost many more every day because their site was down often and had a lot of variability in the speed that the site would load. This can be detrimental to your ranking in search engines like Google too.

Price

I will mention price briefly for one simple point; the most expensive web hosting is not always the best or the right choice for your site. There are several different web hosts that I often recommend that are quite inexpensive, but I have found them to have customer service and support equal to and in some cases greater than much more expensive web hosts.. What I’m looking for personally and for my customers, is a high level of customer service, room to grow, and all at a reasonable price point.

Control Panel

Another option that I highly recommend is a management tool called cPanel. It is a piece of software that your web server runs on and is used to manage your hosting account. cPanel is included with some web hosting companies and is available for an extra charge at others. If you can, always use the cPanel option, it makes managing your site more convenient, makes backing up your data easier, and even moving or upgrading your website much more simple and reliable as well.

Choosing a web Host Check List

So based on my personal experience, here is my basic checklist for selecting the right web hosting company for your website:

• Customer Service – The most important thing is good support anytime you need it.
• Tech Specs – Look at what you need now and will need, find a host to match.
  
• Room For Growth – Make sure you host will have room to grow as your site grows.
  
• cPanel – Makes managing your website easier and more dependable
  
• Price – Look for the best of the above aspects at the most reasonable price, the most expensive is not always the best.

What I Personally Use And Recommend

I have a detailed list of the web tools I use and recommend, but my favorite web hosting company by far is HostGator. I have all my sites there and I build just about all my customers sites there as well. They have an unbelievably low price for the starter package and to me the most important benefit is that even the lowest hosting packages get the same great level of customer support as the higher ones.

If you want to be able to host several different sites, I recommend their VPS Level 3 or above package with cPanel. That is what I have personally with about 5 or 6 websites on it including the one you are on right now. It runs great and I can add as many websites as I want to it, plus it is easy to upgrade should I need to in the future.

Other Web Hosts You Might Want To Consider

Here are some other web hosting companies I have used in the past:

Bluehost

Dreamhost

GoDaddy

Media Temple

Rackspace

If you were to visit the home page of this website you are on right now, in the address bar, you would see the domain name; newleafwebsitedesign.com.

Choosing The Best Domain Name

As you begin thinking about what domain name you would like to have for your website or one that you are building for a customer, there are several important things I want to encourage you to consider.

The first is one that is often overlooked and is this; just using the name of your business is not always the best idea. Sometimes it is better to incorporate a few key words into your domain name that people might be using when they search for your products in search engines.

Questions To Consider

1. What are the main products or services that you provide?  This can help you focus in on specific keywords that the structure, content, and domain name of your new website should be built around. This is important to ensure that people searching for what you offer, can find you in the search engines like Google.com
2. When a potential visitor interested in what you are offering visits a search engine, will they most likely search for the name of your business, or will they search for the name of a product or service that you provide? If you think they will be searching for a specific product or a service that you provide then it might not be bad idea to think a little bit about incorporating a key word or phrase into your domain name, either in addition to the business name or sometimes you don’t need to have to business name in your domain name at all.

SEO Basics & Domain Names

The reason I suggest thinking about the above questions is due to the fact that the domain name is one of the most important factors that search engines use to determine how high of a priority they will place on your website as it relates to the terms being searched for.

I don’t want to get too far into that now, because it can get a little confusing at first, but just give it a little thought. The following illustration should help to explain what I mean.

Illustrations and Examples

Here is an example to help illustrate the importance and application of the ideas and concepts we were describing regarding choosing a domain name above.

There are no hard rules to this, so I’m just suggesting you consider these things, there is really an art to getting a feel for the times when this is the right choice. No one will know your industry, niche, or market space like you do, so it is totally up to you to decide which domain name to choose.

Need More Help?

We can walk you through the process of choosing a domain name for a website step by step

The art of choosing the perfect domain name is covered in detail, as we walk you though the process step by step in our HD video WordPress tutorial series:  How To Make Money Building Websites 101