Choosing the right theme for your WordPress site is probably your most challenging task in creating your first business / corporate website.  You should choose your theme fairly soon after you begin your site (if not immediately), since it does have an impact on how you create your content (i.e., two or three-column layouts, screen width, etc); however, note that in WordPress, content is mostly separate from presentation, so you can always change your theme later.

Here is the process I suggest to my customers, including the wisest choices for a WordPress theme for business:

1. Have a look at our professional WordPress themes samples page for inspiration. Some of these are based on free themes, others are based on theme frameworks, and others are totally custom sites.
2. Decide if you are going to need drop-down menus, since not all themes support them. If you have less than 10 pages on your site, do not use drop-down menus.
3. Try Artisteer first.  This is a Windows software that provides a range of customizable design choices and then generates all the files required to upload to your WordPress installation.  The designs are on the simple side, but attractive.  See this collection of Artisteer-generated templates.  If you don’t want to buy the software ($50), just generate your design and send me the project file (.artx file) and I will generate and upload the theme to your site.
4. Try one of the common theme frameworks.  Using a theme framework will make customization to your site much easier, since
   • Most of the formatting options (CSS settings) are customizable within the WordPress administration form (in Appearance > Theme > Options);
   • A good theme frameworks provides “hooks” for you to attach any text or graphic to a defined region of your site.  Otherwise, you have to edit the PHP file, which is complicated;
   • When the theme provider publishes a new version (ie to fix bug or support a new browser) you don’t have to redo your customizations

   A few good theme frameworks are ThemeFrame (Free – based on the very popular Atahualpa theme), Thesis ($70), and WPRremix ($75).  The Everyman Marketing site is based on Atahualpa.

5. Check out the WordPress.org free themes directory.  Note that unless you find a complete “bull’s eye” design there, customization will be more difficult than if you use a theme framework, and in some cases may be impossible (for example, changing from a 2-column to a 3-column theme, or sometimes even switching the side-bar positions from left to right).
6. If you are looking for a theme for a specific business type, try searching the WordPress theme directory site or else Googling directly, ie, “WordPress theme for therapist”.

However you choose your theme, you will need to upload it to your web site and activate it.  You need an FTP client software for this (I like Filezilla or FireFTP for Firefox) but once you know that, it’s frighteningly simple, and is described in this article.

How to customize a theme

The first thing you will normally do is substitute your company banner and logo.  If you don’t have a banner, we can make one for you for a very reasonable cost, or else make it yourself in an image editing software such as Photoshop or Paint.Net.  You need to upload your banner image to your website using FTP.  If your template was generated with Artisteer, all your styling was done by the program, and so at this point you are done with your styling, and just need to setup your Widgets (see below).

Then check out your customizable theme options (in WordPress Admin > Appearance > Theme Options).  This will normally allow you to set the width of your site and the presence / absence of side-bars.  The best themes and theme frameworks also give you control of the styling of every element of your site, such as background color, font, margins, etc.  You need to know a little CSS to do this, but this is quite simple and if in doubt you can Google “CSS background color” (or whatever) for the precise syntax.  If your theme has a limited number of customizable CSS options and you need to manually edit your CSS file, there is a very cool software called Firebug, which is a Firefox addin that lets you examine each element of your site, view the underlying CSS code, and modify the CSS code on the fly and see the results.  In order to choose color settings, I use the free ColorPix software – just hover the cursor over the color you want (say, another website you want to copy the look-and-feel), and it will tell you the hex color codes (that look like #AA0944 – this is hexadecimal notation).

One you have styled your site to your desired look-and-feel, you need to setup your side-bars.

How to setup your side-bars with the Widget control

1. In your WordPress admin go to Appearance > Widgets
2. Select the left or right side-bar (on the far right of your screen)
3. Drag your choice of widget onto the side-bar and edit it / customize it.
4. Remember to save your settings, then view your site

The most important widget to know is the “Text” widget, which lets you insert custom html text to your side-bar.  Use this, for example, to put your mailing list signup code in your side-bar, or make a “Quotes” section on your site (such as this site), or place Google ads or affiliate links.  It helps to know a little html, but if you don’t, don’t worry.  Just type your text and ask your designer or webmaster to format it, or else look at the underlying html from a site that you want to emulate (in most browsers do View > Page Source and then search for the text that you want to view the html for, or else use Firebug as described above ).

Note that until you place at least one widget in your side-bar, most themes provide default settings that will decide what goes in your side-bars.  So, to take control of this, you need to place at least one widget.

Publishing images and videos to your WordPress site

The easiest way to publish images (with automatic resizing) and video to WordPress is with Windows Live Writer and is described in this article.  Use this, for example, if you want to put both an image and some text in your side-bar: compose the text block with Windows Live Writer, paste in the image, publish it to a temporary post, copy the html on the post and paste it into a text widget, then delete the post.

Mailing list management and WordPress

WordPress is a wonderful platform to create a mailing list for your customers – and it can even be free.  Details in this article.