Site Design: Which Is Right For You?
Choosing a design for your blog, forum, or site is rarely an easy task. Nowadays, there are thousands of themes and skins to choose from. So how do you know which one is right for you?
There are countless criteria you could use to rate your options, but when you think about it all of these factors fall under the following three categories:
Design
It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; so just because you love a Wordpress theme or vBulletin skin, it doesn’t necessarily make it the best choice. In a nutshell, you will want to select a design that would be generally considered both functional and aesthetically pleasing.
Although some may disagree with me, I have found lighter color schemes work better than dark colors. If you need proof, just take a look at the top sites out there like Twitter, CNN, and Facebook. They may use dark colors for accent borders, but their backgrounds are white and they make use of upbeat colors.
You also want to make sure the design can accommodate the features and content you plan to use. For example, if you want to use banner ads, make sure it has built in placeholders to put them.
Platform
What platform will you be building your site on? You will need to know this in order to pick out a compatible design. Today, WordPress is one of the most popular choices and for good reasons! It is a very versatile format which allows advanced configurations. In addition, it is user-friendly and open source (free). For many people, this is probably the best platform.
If you are looking to create a discussion forum or message board, then vBulletin is probably the way to go. My friend created a cosmetic surgery forum for people to discuss rhinoplasty, botox, skin care, etc. He built it on vBulletin and used a premade vBulletin skin for its design. It’s a great platform but the biggest drawback is that it costs a couple hundred dollars, so it’s not affordable to use on multiple sites. This is why he used WordPress for Anti-Wrinkle; his blog about anti-aging skincare.
SEO
Most of the time people don’t think about this when picking out a design, but the truth of the matter is that this is just as important. You want a theme which is coded in an efficient manner. That way your site will load quickly; search engines favor faster load times. You also want it to offer the option of human-readable permalinks, meta tags, and pinging (notifying search engines when you add or modify posts and articles). Optimal usage of title and H1, H2, etc. are also properties which can help with SEO. Having a template which utilizes these practices is the first step to good search engine optimization.
The bottom line is that when choosing a design, it’s important to take into account SEO just as much as the aesthetic elements. Fortunately, there are a number of themes and templates which offer the best of both worlds.