Frequently Asked Questions about WordPress Themes

What's the difference between a free theme and a paid WordPress themes?

The usual belief is that free is not good, and paid is good and worthy, in most cases that's true. Free wordpress themes use other ways to make it worthy to release free themes and publish them online, paid themes on the other hand do not use tricks to make the money for further development since their customers are paying for the product.

When you look for a free WordPress theme, you will probably notice design that is not that good when compared to a paid theme, for good theme designs the designer needs more time to produce something more attractive, also another thing you will notice is the code, that can be not so clean on most cases and no interface of options to configure the theme to your special needs.

Free wordpress themes are just it, free for any use. So how come they are released and how the developers are profiting? Well on most cases some developers release free themes just to create reputation and linkage to their own website, others release sponsored free themes, and others release free themes and later paid themes as well, in that case the paid themes are the ones that keeping the business going and profiting while the free themes bring reputation and respect to the designers.

You may ask yourself why should you go with a paid theme over free theme or the opposite. If you go with a free theme expect low support and bad quality, usually this is the case, on paid themes you get support, better design and also better quality and configuration options.

There are also new kind of free themes available now in the market, those themes are in pair with paid themes, both in quality, support and code standards, those are free upgradable themes. Those kind of themes focus on mass distribution of these themes (people love free), and make their profits by users who upgrade them later on. Usually these kind of themes can be even better then paid themes, because they offer more configuration options, more guidelines, and better support to convince people to upgrade.

How to configure wordpress themes?

If you want to configure a WordPress theme, that can be a problem if the theme owners don't offer some kind of tool to do the configuration automatically without the user touching the code itself.

Most of the free wordpress themes don't offer those tools, but some others do. Basically, if a user has to touch the code and mess it up and then fix it, it's just an hassle for both the user and the developer, good free wordpress theme providers such as alivethemes.com release a configuration options to configure the theme for the users special need. In addition it also releases tutorials for more advanced configuration that involves coding, that way the user is never left in a dark spot on his own.

So the next time you choose a theme, first find if it's easy to be configured, otherwise you might end up spending days to configure it for your needs.

How does a developer make a certain theme configurable?

For that purpose a developer inserts special coding in the areas that he wants to be configurable and a user interface screen where he lets the user choose the options, if a user decides to choose a certain Block in the theme to be disabled, then the developer codes that block accordingly as well, he will use IF php statements to do that.

How does one go about designing his own theme?

Designing a theme can be hard because you should have the necessary skills to design, you should ha photoshop skills and an eye touch to do all those things and create a good looking design, that usually comes as you try more and more to create better designs.

How does one go about coding the theme?

If you have a design ready, then it's not enough because you will have to convert it to a WordPress theme. There are bunch of tutorials online so you can Google it and find out, but to warn you upfront, that's really not an easy task, it will involve slicing your design, coding PHP files, and CSS as well. It will require weeks to go about it if you are starting from scratch and you have no HTML/CSS knowledge.