Before I even settled down comfortably with my blog, I was wondering, “Hey, this (default ) theme is so god damn boring!”. So, the next thing you know, I was out on the net making a voyage to find the perfect theme for my blog. Soon enough, I was able to zero in on a good theme for the site. It was my very first theme change and it was done even before the site went online.

My first third-party theme was: Antique-Modern (Design by Aaron and ported by Sreejith, GFXedit.Com). It was a good theme and while I applied this theme a year back, I also learned various other options and functions provided to us by WordPress. I had to customize the theme according to my requirement and that was the flipside of it. I worked on it for lets say two-three hours straight. Even though, I put in that much effort customizing that theme, I was going to change it down the line sometime and I knew that.

About eight months down the line, I did try to change my theme to another good theme called, Internet-Market v1.2 (Orignal Design by Luka cvrk, Framework : Concept Nova and ported by Sreejith, GFXedit.Com). But it was quite difficult to customize this theme according to my requirements and since I had already activated it on my blog while it was ‘live’, I had messed up my users. I had to revert to the previous theme.

Exactly an year later (on my blog’s anniversary), I started searching for another theme which looked good and which could be ported with ease. I found a theme called, Midnight Mellow v1.0 and I liked it. I customized it and it worked fine. So, I decided to keep it (My removing it after two months is another story).

Now my second theme namely,Midnight Mellow v1.0, was good and was quite customizable. It lacked only one thing. It was not flexible enough to accomodate small posts with large sidebars (sidebars with lot’s of info and links in them). I happened to find this bug the hard way! But the moment I saw this, I started my search for another simple and good theme. The result of this search gave me the current theme, Rainbow Style (by Lee Cooper).

This theme has been easily customized by me and it did not mess up with the sidebar even with extra info that I added to it. So it was a good theme and so it is there.

The lesson that I learned from this is this, Choose your themes carefully!

As I explained in my article on how to setup a complete test environment of your site on your home system. All complete with as much of the online data and plugins as possible. This way you are sure that you have your actual site at home. So the next time you download a new theme, you have the perfect place to test and customize it right on your home system. No more sleepless nights over messing up your site. No more crying over lost traffic. No more headaches.

Related Pages from All Pumped Up!:

• Things to do when starting your own blog
• WordPress Plugins that I use
• WordPress plugins, when to use what and when not to…
• Writing a good blog ain’t that difficult
• Ensuring that adding a plugin or theme or an upgrade to your WordPress blog is successful

More on blogging can be found at these sites that I found interesting:

• Lorelle’s WordPress Blog
• How to Start a Blog
• How to Blog

So, you think you can write better than this? Well, if you can send in your credentials and I’ll let you write.

Possibly Related Articles