Welcome to nimopress

Welcome to nimopress. If you are seeing this post before 1st Feb 2010, the you have somehow landed on my blog before I mentioned the move to anyone. It would also mean I’m in the process of building the site so do bear with me. nimopress.com is my new domain and I will be moving my old WordPress blog over once I have all things sorted out here.

Amongst all things to do with a new WordPress installation, I am looking for a new blog theme. There are of course numerous blog themes available out there mostly free to use and a growing number of premium themes where a purchase is required to obtain a license and download the themes for use. I’m not new to premium themes per say since I did spend USD$99 on a premium themes membership at GraphPaperPress. There was no mention of a renewal fee when I first made the purchase. A few months into being a member, the terms were changed to an annual renewable member.

In all fairness, Thad Allender did provide those who bought the premium themes before the change with a full year of new members access. My membership will be up for renewal soon which I have decided not to. There’s nothing wrong with GPP to be honest. They do release new great looking themes every so often and even upgrade their existing themes with new features and functions.

However, I do feel perhaps GPP themes will be more suited to weblogs of a more artistic nature. Most of their themes make great photography portfolio sites. Now that’s one hobby that I have not been able to spend much time on. For folks who would like to build a great looking portfolio style site, I would still recommend you have a look at the themes available at GraphPaperPress (affiliate linked).

Moving on, in my search for a new theme, I have decided on the follow criteria in my selection.

Excellent typography
Search engine optimized and friendly.
Easy to customize on the WordPress dashboard.
Pass W3C’s HTML and CSS markup validation.
Cost effective.

Excellent Typography

Easy reading. That’s it. As the blogsphere evolved, so did blog themes. No doubt, there are a whole bunch of great looking themes out there that will not fail to grab your attention or leave you in awe. The huge problem is as designs get more elaborate, one key reason blogs exist becomes ignored; typography. Spotting a flashy design will grab the attention of your visitors. However, if it’s at the expense of having a good layout with easy to read fonts, chances are, the blog will end up losing readers pretty soon.

The key I feel will be to strike a balance somewhere with more emphasis on not being too trying on the eyes. I hate to say this but my last blog was a good example of typography gone bad. White on black is never a good idea unless you keep to under 20 words.

Search Engine Optimized and Friendly

The truth is this, WordPress on it’s own is already rather search engine friendly. By installing and make some minor tweaks to a plugin like the All-In-One-SEO-Pack should get you pretty much sorted out. As for me, I tend to ask for a little too much at times and want a theme with built-in SEO tweaking options. There are more than a handful number of themes out there today that claims to be SEO friendly just by slapping on some badly written codes. Still, I believe there will be that odd few that will deliver what they promise.

Easy to Customize on WordPress dashboard

I’m not a HTML idiot but I have to admit neither am I an expert. Everything that I’m able to do today is basically self-taught. With the number of times I have messed up my blog themes when I first started blogging. I do know some stuff but not enough to avoid messing up again. As for CSS and stylesheets, I’m a complete nutter and knowing that I can open a .css file in Dreamweaver is as far as it goes. So, a backend setup option for the theme would be great. The more tweaking options, the better.

Pass W3C’s HTML and CSS Markup Validation

Some will probably say this is something that is not crucial and question my need for such a criteria. It’s probably not too hard to find a theme that will pass the HTML validation. Finding one where the stylesheet passes the CSS validation too is a little tougher. Now even if the theme does pass the markup validations on first install, there’s still a pretty high chance it would fail either of both further down the road.

Main culprits for that would be plugins, images, videos and such. Some of these can be fixed quite easily by adding or removing a couple of strokes in the codes. That I can deal with. If the theme returns anything more than 5 lines of error, it’s not for me. I’m better of typing another 5 lines on my blog posts instead. Again, maybe I am old school but it is my belief that a theme that passes W3C markup validations will in more cases than not load quickly in your browser. Then again, there are other factors for a fast loading blog. I’m open to find out more about what bloggers have to say about this. So, if you have something you would like to point out to me, please feel free to leave a comment.

Cost Effective

This is a rather vague statement but in simple terms, free is best followed by cheap and low cost to premium. I googled for a SEO friendly theme the past couple of days and a few options came up. One such option is the Thesis WordPress Theme (affiliate linked). At USD$87, it cost a little less than what I paid for my GraphPaperPress Themes Membership (affiliate linked).

I’m seriously considering Thesis and don’t mind something at that price for a lifetime membership compared to a year. I’m wondering if it does pass W3C’s HTML and CSS validation though. Not like I can give it a test run till I purchased the theme. In the meantime, I will be testing out some other themes and perhaps share my thoughts on some of the better ones.