In today’s theme market, there are a tremendous number of Joomla blog themes available, featuring different overall styles, color schemes, layouts, module locations, and special functions. This large offering seems great, but in the meanwhile, causes a huge confusion for webmasters to pick a preferred one.
Due to this situation, we have concluded a list of tips concerning about how to choose a proper template for your Joomla blogs in the following.
Think about Budget
As for the picking up of Joomla templates, you firstly need to think about the budget. After all, different theme designers set different levels of price for their products.
Generally, the template charge is ranging from $40 to $80. Therefore, if you want to get a paid one, you can choose one that is within this range. If you install a theme that is extremely cheap or even free, you may encounter some security issues, and if your template is more expensive than $80, it is not a cost-effective option for merely a blog site.
Consider the Security and User Base
As we have searched, 22% of the hacking issues are caused by the vulnerabilities of Joomla templates. Therefore, before downloading one, you should think about it security level. To figure out this aspect, you can do two things:
Check one Google with the searching query of “template name security” or”template name hacking”.
Make sure that this template is updated constantly. This simply means that the theme developer is maintaining it unceasingly.
Besides the security, you also should think about the user base. Generally, the download frequency can be checked from the source page. If you find that a theme has been downloaded for thousands of times, you’d better not to choose it. After all, this large user base can degrade the uniqueness of your blog site.
Choose One that Is Fully Responsive
Everyone knows the importance of responsiveness for a Joomla template, but here, we still want to emphasize this aspect.
According to the survey on the web among 1000 online users, we have found that more than 350 of them prefer to browse a website using tablets, and around 200 of them are inclined to use the phones. Many of them even express that they are more likely to open their computer, sit next to it, but check a website using a laptop.
Therefore, to make sure that your readers can have a great reading experience, you’d better use a responsive theme that can adapt to different viewing devices and screen sizes automatically.
Pick a Simple Template Instead of a Rich-Feature One
Note that you are going to set up a blog site, but not a large online store or a business portal. Therefore, you do not need to choose a feature-heavy theme that is featuring a large number of sliders, JavaScript animations and pre-installed tools. After all, the majority of advanced functions are useless for a common blog site.
Besides, a complicated theme requires a large amount of HTTPS requests to run and occupy large server resources to store files and data. To be frank, this nature may negatively affect your page loading speed and website stability.
Pay Attention to the Overall Design and Usability
Now, you should think about the designing, style, color and layout of your blog theme. After all, the purpose for you to use a theme is to beautify your website and upgrade its attraction. As different people may have different aesthetic, we only list some common tips in the following.
Choose one that has a bright color scheme, but do not adopt those that are too colorful.
Pick one that has a clear and well-organized layout.
Make sure the template has the sections for sidebar, header and footer.
Focus on Reader Experience and Ease of Handling
Never choose a theme that has a complex design, making readers have no idea of how to start reading. The overall layout needs to be clearly determined, while the navigation bar should be easy to be handled.
Besides, as Joomla has an inbuilt feature of Read More button, some theme designers support it at each blog post. Therefore, when people enter the article, they need to click the Read More button and wait for the page responding to check the full content. This kind of theme is undoubtedly not worth trying.
In addition to the user experience, you also should check the ease of customization. After all, an intuitive theme panel can make the configuration process much simple.
Check SEO
Themes also have the impact on SEO to some extent. Therefore, you should pay more attention to those that claim to be SEO friendly. If you do not believe them, you can install some extensions on your browser like Moxbar to check the SEO of the theme demo.
Summary
Choosing a proper Joomla theme for blog sites is a relatively time-consuming thing. Therefore, we have listed some recommended ones at this page which are free to download. If you want some paid ones with great quality, you can also check the Joomla resources sites like BestHostingForJoomla and Joomla.org.
