WordPress is the perfect website platform for businesses of all sizes. It's flexible, open source design means that WordPress is flexible enough to cater for nearly all perceivable business requirements.
Here's my advice of key elements you need to check before you buy a business WordPress theme.
SEO
Seach Engine Optimisation, usually known as SEO is a key part of the success of any business looking to promote it's self on the Internet. WordPress is pretty good at SEO out of the box. However some business WordPressthemes include extra SEO features, sometime without the need for plugins.
Your life will be made easier if you can easily make changes to the themes page titles, meta data and other key SEO elements. If your theme doesn't include it's own SEO features then you should check that it's compatible with leading plugins such as “All In One Seo” (most themes are ok).
How easy is it use
Not all themes are made equal. Your going to be in the backend of your WordPress site quite a lot and you want to ensure that its going to be easy to make use of all of your new themes features. Some themes have well designed admin and posting option boxes within WordPress. These are great as it's usually straight forward to work on your website. You also want to ensure that if possible the theme supports widgets and the WordPress 3.0 menu system. Again these two feature make customising the basics of your site really easy.
Some themes don't. They might require some extra technical knowledge maybe the use of lots of custom fields or other complicated plug-ins.
How easy is it to customise
Your probably going to want to customise your theme to your own tastes and styles. Some themes come with a whole range of colour schemes and style sheets making it easy to make the site your own. Some Themes such as Thesis and WP-Remix literally have hundreds of different combinations making virtually unlimited layouts and styles.
Does it have key business elements
If you're in business your probably going to want to encourage your visitors to take some kind of action on your website. This could be signing up to your mailing list of contacting your for more information (a lead).
To encourage this there are some key elements you're probably going to need. Here's some of I think are the most important.
- Space for Testimonials around the site
- Room for a clear call to action or statement
- Contact forms
- Clear contact details in the header such as phone number
- Portfolio or our work pages to clearly show off your work
Summary
When buying a new business WordPress theme as long as you are clear on your own requirements and how the theme will fit with your marketing messages you should be ok. Look for themes with these key features and you'll find it easy to get your new business website up quickly and easily.
