In Jodie's Brain

About an hour ago, Tweeter @yukarip asked where to go for the “best Wordpress themes” and @funkyplates said she should talk to me. Oh, no pressure at all ;) (but thanks!)

The short answer is “there is no best place.”

I can hear some people now: “Ya, but…”

Ya but nothing… It’s kind of like asking “Where’s the best place to eat out?” You know that people will follow it up with “What kind of food do you like?” and “How much do you want to pay?’ or “What time of day are you going?” even “How many people are going?” as well as “What part of town?”.

Truth is, you sometimes need to go to a dozen restaurants before you find your own, personal Cheers.

Before you can go searching for your own “best place to find Wordpress themes” you need to know many, many things about your site – and yourself – like:

• What colours do you want to use?
• Will you be having a lot of pages?
• Are you comfortable installing plug-ins or widgets if the theme requires it?
• Are you able to recognize an “almost what I want” theme and either tweak it yourself or get someone to fix it?
• Who is the audience?

The honest truth is, it’s probably best to spend an hour or five going through many, many, many different themes (and you’ll start to see duplicates on different sites). Download lots, install lots and go through all the previews using your own site. Most of them look really sexy before you download, but once you have your own things up, you either find it doesn’t fit well or you’re going to have to install 5 plug-ins or widgets to make it look like it did “on the box.”

What do I do? I simply go to Google and start my search with “free wordpress themes” or “free wordpress templates” and spend some time poking about there. Then I move on to places like Theme Forest or something quite robust like Headway (which I’m still playing with…).

To start, I’d go up and down the aisles, find a lot of free ones and do a lot of taste testing; how do you know you’re going like something until you nibble?

Got this question because she would like to keep things a bit hidden until the reveal is ready ;)

Completely hiding a site takes a bit extra geekiness, so we’re going to do the next best thing; set things to “Draft.”

First, to the right of a page or a post, there is the “Publish” box:

Click on Edit. Then you will see this:

1) Click on the drop-down menu and choose “Draft”

2) Click “OK”

3) Click on “Update Page” (on a Post, it will say Update Post)

This will take them off the public site, yet you can still see them and work with them  within your WordPress back-end.

If you’d like to take it a step further, go back into your General Settings and delete the site’s title and tag line for now, and re-enter them just before you launch. Another thing you may want to do is NOT activate the theme you have chosen – stay with the default until just before. Activate the theme every how and then to see how things will look, but go back to the original.

YOU can still view the pages as if they were published, by clicking on the “Preview” button:

To easily see which pages are in Draft mode, click the Pages button on the left of the Dashboard, and you’ll see “Draft” by the ones that are, well… in Draft ;)

To make them visible again, just go back to the Publish box and click on the “Publish” button. Let me know if there is more ;)