Creative Themes Design

Another 7 Creative WordPress Themes Design Tips

07/27/2010  |  Category: Blog, Creative Designs  |  161 views  |   Print This  |   Email This  | 

After the popular 10 Creative Design Tips, here is another set of 7 WordPress Marketing Themes Design Tips to create effective websites for small businesses.

We specialize in creating highly effective but simple WordPress marketing themes that are used by bloggers, freelancers, online marketers, affiliate marketers & MLM business owners for their small businesses.

Our focus has always been on making a functional website rather than one that looks stunning with images & graphics but fails to deliver results to our customers!

1. Design for the Website Visitors (or Website Customers or Blog Readers)

Too often we see that website or business owners design & redesign their websites for themselves. Websites are for the customers (blogs are for readers) & needs to be designed for them.

2. Create a Priority list of Pages / Posts that are Most Valuable

Websites & blogs can only display so much in one page (or post). Likewise, majority of the readers (or customers) will only read as much as the top 5 – 10 lines of your blog or business site.

Creating a list of priority items & effectively displaying them on either the home page or all the pages helps in engaging the readers better.

3. Choose a combination of drop-down menu & in-line menu

Designing menus could be difficult & creative theme makers often get carried away while designing a very graphically impressive menu. Step back & think if it helps the customer who would be using these menus to find what they need easily & quickly.

We have found that majority of the customers still prefer a horizontal top menu with a secondary left side menu. They hardly prefer drop down menus & those often get passed unnoticed.

4. Design for the least number of Clicks

Palm is the best known designer to make phones that require users the least number of clicks to get to the application they want. They design their phones & software so that with at the most 3 clicks, any Palm phone user can access anything they want on their phones!

The lesser number of clicks the customer (or blog reader) has to perform to get to what they want, or to find new posts on your website, the more they stick to you.

5. Use Images only if they serve a purpose to the customer

Images could serve a few purposes:

1. they draw attention
2. they allow designers to be creative
3. they beautify the design
4. helps display products effectively
5. they help in SEO etc

Use images on your website designs depending on what the purpose of the image is. If its a Buy Now button, sure go ahead & use an image with an ALT tag. Or if you are want to show how a product looks like, you should use as many images as necessary.

But you could certainly cut down on using background images, that serve the only purpose of beautifying the design.

6. Use Custom Fields for functionality

Custom fields help you extend a CMS software like WordPress many folds by helping you to implement specific functionality for the business. Custom fields have to be created by the website owner & are stored in the database.

As designers you have to leave it to the theme owner to create the custom fields correctly. As designers you have to optimize on your database queries so that these custom fields do not slow down rendering of the website in real life.

7. Use plugins as re-usable components to extend the capability of your creative WordPress themes

The WordPress community has created one of the largest repository of plugins that can extend the usability & effectiveness of a website. However, each additional plugin comes with its own risk:

• you have no control over how the plugin will work unless you edit them for yourself
• you cannot offer technical support to the plugin in case it goes wrong somewhere
• you may have to overcome any limitations of the plugin with additional programming

It is a matter of choice whether to build creative WordPress themes that must use plugins. Our premium business themes work well without them, but we also leave it to the theme owner to implement any extra plugin that they want (like YPN & Adsense plugins, Site Counter plugins, video embed plugins etc).

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