Creative Themes Design

10 Tips to Design a Great Creative Marketing Theme for WordPress

08/02/2010  |  1,142 views  |   Print This  |   Email This  | 

We specialize in designing Creative Marketing & Advertising WordPress Themes for Small Businesses, affiliate marketers, MLM business owners & freelance bloggers. Many freelance WordPress theme designers often ask us how to create a great WordPress theme, especially for the business clients.

A great creative design could help clients bring in more customers, run marketing campaigns easily & help them sell more! Man designers are surprised when we say that the process of creating a great website design starts with understanding the client’s need for a website in the first place!

Designing a Great WordPress Theme for Marketing & Advertising Businesses

A great design, that meets the needs of your customer, not just his / her ego of having the most beautiful looking website in the world, is an evolution. A creative design emerges from various discussions, surveys, white board sessions etc.

Here are 10 tips to keep in mind that could lead to creating a great WordPress theme for your clients.

1. Why do you need a new design

Assuming that your client has an existing website, why do they need a new one? Most of the time we have seen that clients want a new design simply because “the current design has been up for a long time”.

Good enough reason to go for a new design, but that does not give you, as a designer, any clue on what to design!

2. Who needs a new design

This is very similar to the previous point but more to do with what to design. Clients would often be able to list down their customers’ segments to be able to understand what sort of visitors the website would have.

Profiling website visitors is one of the best ways to begin a great website design, especially if you are creating them for marketing & advertising clients.

As an example, if you know that 30%+ visitors would be international, you may want to think of providing a language translation tool on the creative design.

3. Why did the existing design fail

Research to see why the existing design is not able to meet your client’s needs.

4. A choice between functionality & cosmetics

Once you have gathered enough information on why the client needs a new design & who their customers would be, chart out the functional vs cosmetic sections of your design.

You need to weigh in the right amount of functionality to build along with the right amount of cosmetics so that there is a fair balance between the two.

5. Is technology a challenge in the design

This has more to do with the functional aspect of the design. Although we design WordPress Marketing Themes for small business, many times our solutions are made up of a WordPress part for its CMS and a static or a dynamic part that is required to be built in conjunction.

These decisions are transparent to the website visitors but would impact the cost & the schedule of the design & implementation.

6. Can the existing design be altered to the new requirements

Think simple! A new design is business for you, but you can also save your client a lot of money & time simply by adding a few features or quick cosmetic changes to their current website.

7. The blueprint approval

What we mean by blueprint is a combination of;

(1) a drawing that shows how the new website would look like when its ready

(2) a html mock up of the site so that it gives your clients a good feel of a real life situation once the new design is live

(3) sample test scenarios if there are a lot of functionality to explain to the client how the user experience would be

Too many freelancers spend too less time on this process, leading to changes in designs, over runs in schedules & cost leaving a very unhappy client.

8. What will the new design offer (or fail to offer)

We usually present a table (in Excel or Word) that lists the features our clients want & what the new design will (or will not provide). This straightens out a lot of expectation mis-matches by the time the project is complete.

9. Limitations of a generic off-the-shelf-theme

Off the shelf WordPress Themes are generic in nature. They are designed to serve 80% of the client’s need in a particular niche but always leaves out a personal touch.

If you already have a selection of creative designs done for a niche, you may want to customize that for your client. This solution is quick & often very cheap.

10. What would your client consider a “Great Design”

We began with understanding why the client needs a new design & who the new design is meant to serve. The list could be a combination of qualitative information as well as quantitative measure.

As an example, your client might want a theme that reflects their business of “delivering the tastiest pizza in town” & that there should be “at least 500 customer sign-ups in the first 3 months of local pizza lovers”.

While some of these can be confined to a creative design (the liveliness of taste) some would depend on how the website is marketed. It is not the job of the website to bring in customers – but when they come in, your design should make it easy for them to sign up – that is the creative part!

In several prior articles we have mentioned how to ensure that your design will satisfy the clients when you finally deliver the theme. Since you would be programming the themes, you would know the limitations of your design as well, something that may not be quite apparent to the client.

We usually disclose such limitations either during the development process, or testing period. It is really not necessary, but a good trust building practice since it simply helps us being in good faith with our clients!

Category: Blog, Creative Designs