Eric's Estimate

Finding a Wordpress Theme

Posted on December 2, 2009 by Eric

First thing’s first. Yes, I’m a web designer. Yes I download wordpress themes. Why? Because I’m far too lazy to not take advantage of the 1000s of free themes that are out there for the taking and then modify them.

At the same time though, I want to say how many crappy themes are out there. For every 100 themes I looked at when finding one for this site I looked at 98 ones that weren’t worth anything.

So many of them have too many gradients, too many flashy drop shadows and too many god damn rounded corners! Has anyone ever heard of subtlety???

That got me thinking… how many times have you seen landing pages that are over the top? Do you have any?

Landing/Sales pages should be simple. A good rule of thumb is to keep taking things away from them until you can’t remove anything else without removing functionality. Is that drop shadow really going to help your sales? Is having that logo 12px larger really going to improve your CTR?

Maybe… but probably not… and if you’re really into superfluous design work, you can always test that extra plastic molding on your site against a nice clean and subtle page. Chances are, the subtle page will win.

Oh, and welcome to the new blog. This being my first post I wanted to make it a bit of a rant.