Anatomy of a Failed Theme Decision (and How to Avoid Making the Same Mistake!)
This past Thursday, early afternoon, after much tweaking and adjusting and adding obscure personal touches to the style sheet, I switched HostScope over to a new theme. If you are looking around the page and thinking “hmmm… it doesn’t look different”, you would be right. I have since switched back, despite preferring the new look in a lot of ways.
Let me explain.
I haven’t been thrilled with the look of HostScope for a while now. I still think Leia is a lovely theme, but have grown to feel it is too top-heavy for this site.
So, I started looking around for a new theme. Now, I look at WordPress themes all the time, but there is a difference between checking out a theme and checking out a theme with a specific application in mind. In the lattre case, you have a better feel for how your content will pour into each theme. You can see things more clearly, both good and bad. Your imagination just works better when it has some specifics to use. All of which means that you get pickier.
After looking a more themes that I thought possible and much deliberation, and consultation with my more design-savvy wife, I settled on Dilectio from Smashing Magazine and Design Disease. If you haven’t seen it before, check it out. Dilectio is a lovely theme that manages to look both professional and fun at the same time. I was pleased with my choice.
Of course, I had to tweak some things. I have tables and pictures in posts that I wanted to look just right, so a bit of extra stuff was added into the style sheet. A few other changes followed. I removed the about box. I changed the recent activity box to show articles instead of comments by default and to have a tag cloud tab. I customized the top menu. I added a custom box to the first sidebar. I made the comments threaded. I fixed the lack of titles and navigation on tag pages. Okay, there were a lot of changes, but a lot of them would have been needed with any theme. Themes are starting points after all and if you aren’t tuning your theme for your site, you probably aren’t doing your site justice.
Finally, on Thursday, it was ready to go. I went to the Appearances tab and clicked “activate.” And sside from a few last minute frantic fixes, all was good.
That lasted about 30 hours.
What happened then? Well, I was catching up on the WordPress news of the last day or so and read about the launch of the wp.me URL shortening service. wp.me is not a bad idea, but it didn’t blow me away. What it did do was remind me that I’ve been meaning to find a good short-short domain of my own. The fact that wp.me was billed as the only two-letter .me domain seemed interesting, so I decided to give .me a closer look. As it happened, Google sent me to metld.com (a blog about the .me domain) instead of domain.me (the registar for the .me domain).
And what to my wondering eyes did appear?
metld.com has used Dilectio as well. And I instantly knew that I had left out a critical step in the theme selection process. I didn’t bother to see what other sites were using it and, even more important, how many other sites were using it.
How could I have done that? Well, you are supposed to keep the Design Disease credit line on your pages if you use Dilectio, so that gives us a nice phrase to Google. The phrase matches 171,000 pages. Whether that is 171 sites with a 1,000 pages each or the other way around, it is still a big number. I really should not have been surprised. Dilectio was released by in December 2007 and 20 months is a long time on the web.
Now, is it really so bad to look like other sites? Maybe, maybe not. I depends to a certain extent on what the other sites are about. If the theme you are considering has been used for sites about fashion, movies, and yachting, but you’re going to use it for a blog about politics, you’re may be okay. On the other hand, if it is already being used for something related to your topic, it can be a problem. It might give people the impression that you site is somewhat generic. For a personal blog, this isn’t a big deal. Hey, it’s just your site. But if your site is trying to do something more substantial, you want it to stand out.
So, the moral of the story is this: when choosing a theme for you site, do your homework (or hire a designer to create a theme just for your site). Find out what other sites are using the theme and how many of them there are. Find out what subjects they cover and if there is overlap with your subject. See how long the theme has been available. Maybe think about how you could modify the theme to look different enough, but keep the feel and organization that you liked in the first place.
And, if there is a problem and you can’t change the theme enough, you have to be willing to let it go. It doesn’t matter how much you like the theme; even the most beautiful theme can become overused.
We all make mistakes. You don’t need to make this one.
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