How do you choose a wordpress theme? If you are like many people this can be a challenge once you begin using wordpress. There are literally thousands to choose from both free and paid. When I first began using wordpress I spent way too much time loading different themes and changing my blog themes around. The biggest challenges I encountered are:

1. Not all themes allow you to upload a custom banner and while I don’t necessarily have to have one, it is a nice feature and on some of my blogs I really wanted one.

2. Not all themes allow you to use a different layout on pages as compared with your posts and I wanted to be able to do these.

3. Different themes have different color schemes and not all of them allow you to customize and change your theme colors.

4. Some themes have places where you can install pictures, or ads but if you choose not to put them in those spots then you have no way to remove the “ad goes here” image.

5. The layout and sizing of columns as well as the number of columns you can have varies from wordpress theme to wordpress theme.

6. You can’t use a custom menu with all wordpress themes. This means that some of them don’t give you the option of creating pages and then hiding them from the menu on the home page. Since I use my wordpress blogs to create capture pages and I don’t want them all appearing on my home page, I have to have a theme that does let me have a custom menu.

All things considered, how do you choose the right wordpress theme? I recommend two things.

1. I recommend that you buy a theme. I know you can use the free ones but from my experience either the Thesis themes or Genesis which both are paid, are the best. They fit all the requirements listed and have a lot of customization and flexibility options. You can get either of them at Studio Press.

2. You can also check out woothemes which has some great ones or take a look at the WordPress Gallery from WordPress.org

If you have a wordpress blog, how did you choose your wordpress theme?