One of the great things about WordPress is the thousands of high quality themes available for the platform. What is a theme? A WordPress theme defines the look-and-feel of your site, or its design. The theme contains a specific set of style sheets and templates that determine the fonts, colors, styles and layouts of the pages within a WordPress website. Themes in WordPress can be installed and activated, rapidly transforming the way your whole site looks, much like a paint job and window tinting can transform the look of your car. The car interior and engine remain the same, but it looks very different on the outside.

With WordPress, you have a couple of options when it comes to choosing a theme for your site - you can have a professional web designer create a custom theme for you or you can purchase a pre-designed, commercial, theme. Both of these approaches have pros and cons.

Commercial themes have a number of things going for them:

1. There are many attractive choices. Not only are there very well-designed options but, increasingly, there are options for specific types of businesses. Are you looking for a spa theme? There are tons of those. Do you need a well-designed real-estate theme? No problem.
2. They are a great value. Most commercial WordPress themes sell for anywhere from $29 to $99. Compared to the cost of having a professional graphic designer create a custom designed website, this is a fantastic value for your money.
3. They enable you to get up and running quickly. Rather than going through a custom design process, which can be time consuming, commercial themes enable you to get your site up and running quickly. Just install the theme and start adding content.
4. They are highly customizable. Many commercial themes today give you control over every aspect of the theme, including the header, footer, background, font styles, colors, etc.

On the other hand, commercial themes have some downsides:

1. The more attractive the theme you’ve chosen, the more likely 10,000 or more other website owners have purchased the same theme. Therefore, your website ends up looking exactly like a lot of other websites.
2. While there are more and more industry-specific themes, they still aren’t as specific to your business as a custom design would be. And while you can customize a theme, if you try to customize it too much, it may end up taking longer and costing more than if you had just had a designer start from scratch.
3. Because they are so highly customizable, many commercial themes have become bloated with all of the features they have added, causing sites based on these themes to load more slowly.
4. Since the underlying code in a commercial theme can be viewed by anyone that is willing to pay the $29 - $99 entry fee, hackers can gain access to the entire code base, review it for bugs and if they find any, search Google for all sites based on this theme and hack them. For this reason, hacking a commercial theme is one of the primary entry points that hackers use to compromise WordPress websites.
5. Good theme developers recognize that due to both the security issues explained above, as well as the need to be competitive in the market place, producing regular upgrades to their theme is a good thing. The problem with this, however, is that it creates a greater burden on site owners to stay up to date, constantly downloading and applying the latest theme update provided by the developer. And theme updates are the primary cause of site glitches, increasing the potential that after a theme is updated, some or all of your site will look different or be broken in some way.

The alternative to a commercial theme is a custom produced theme. A graphic designer creates a unique design and then a web developer turns that design into a custom WordPress theme.

The cons of custom designed themes are:

1. They are more costly. You need to pay a professional designer and web developer for their time which is typically orders of magnitude more expensive than buying a commercial theme.
2. They take longer to produce so you can’t get your site running as quickly as you could with a commercial theme.
3. They are typically less customizable. While a web developer could build all of the bells and whistles into your theme that a commercial theme has, this is typically not done as it’s impractical in terms of how long it would take. This means that certain types of changes to your site down the road might require help from your web developer.

Custom themes have their own set of advantages:

1. They are unique and can be more specifically designed and branded for your company. All large companies custom design their websites to enable their creative teams to build a site that is distinct, has personality and is consistent with the overall company brand.
2. Because the underlying code of a custom theme is developed just for you, hackers don’t have access to it. As a result, custom themes are far less likely to be hacked.
3. If a developer isn’t trying to build everything and the kitchen sink into a theme in order to make it appeal to the widest audience possible, they can focus on adding only the code needed for your site. This makes for much more light-weight, fast-loading themes.
4. Since a custom theme is less vulnerable to security issues, there is little need for your developer to put out constant theme updates. As a result, the cost of maintaining a custom theme over time is typically far less than with a commercial theme. No theme updates equates to much less breakage in your site over time and therefore less maintenance.

The decision of whether to go with an off-the-shelf, commercial theme versus a custom designed theme often comes down to a question of budget. A custom designed theme is the direction that most businesses want to go if they can afford it. The simple fact that they are uniquely designed for your business, like a custom brochure versus one you might produce at Kinkos, means that they will better represent your company’s brand online. The additional facts that, if produced by an experienced developer, they will be more secure, faster, and require less maintenance over time make custom themes a no brainer for companies that have the budget.

On the other hand, if you need to get your site up and running quickly and/or you have a more limited budget, a commercial theme offers excellent value for the money.

Both WordPress and Drupal are powerful, mature content management systems with worldwide support and large websites counted among their users. So, which should you build your next website in?

We’ve built very large websites, as well as many smaller ones, in both WordPress and Drupal. There are things that we like about both of them, but since WordPress has rapidly jumped into the lead in terms of total users, following are the top 3 reasons for and against using WordPress for your website.

Reasons For:

1. Easy upgrade path. WordPress has upgrades wired. Drupal and other content management systems (Joomla, anyone?) require almost a complete rebuild of the site every time they do a major release. Minor releases may not be that difficult to implement but, to date, it has been untenable to stay up to date with the other platforms and therefore websites built on them inevitably get out of date and vulnerable to security breaches, performance issues and other problems over time. For better or worse, WordPress has maintained tremendous consistency in its database structure, template system and other aspects that have made updating the software over time possible, if not always easy.
2. Massive third-party development. Because the WordPress universe is so much larger than that of either Drupal or Joomla (WordPress holds 30% of the worldwide market, compared to 7% for Drupal and 1% for Joomla), there are many more plugins, themes and services available that work with WordPress. This adds tremendous value to your ability to improve site functionality over time.
3. Stronger Developer & User Support. Because WordPress dwarfs the other two in terms of its user base, there are always developers who can help and users are much more likely to have been exposed to it, reducing development, training and maintenance costs. WordPress is also generally considered to be he easiest to use.

Reasons against:

1. The constant updates to WordPress and plugins creates an upgrade burden on site owners. If you don’t update, you fall behind and can fall prey to bugs and insecurities. If you do update, you occasionally will run into conflicts created by the latest version of WordPress or a plugin that causes issues with your site. Essentially, you have to factor in more maintenance costs. Arguably, however, the other platforms have this same cost it’s just that it’s so much higher that most people never do the upgrades and therefore inevitably their sites have problems or get hacked
2. There are way MORE plugins for WordPress but many of them are not that mature. There are a few vertical markets that have deeply committed to Drupal and make modules for that platform for which analogs do not exist in the WordPress world. For those few industries, it’s a no brainer to go with Drupal. This probably doesn’t apply to you and, if it does, you’ll know because you’ll be talking to a vendor who requires you to use Drupal in order to buy their product.
3. Due to it’s much greater popularity, WordPress is a bigger target for hackers, just like Windows is a bigger target than the Mac for viruses. On the other hand, the greater amount of security activity has arguably led to a more secure platform over time. Either way, the greater risk can be overcome with keeping WordPress up to date and utilizing good security plugins and practices, just like you maintain a good Virus checker if you live in the Windows world.

So, which platform should you go with? For most developers and site owners, WordPress is a clear choice for its straightforward upgrade path, large third-party marketplace and stronger developer, as well as user, support. In rare instances, if you are looking to build a large proprietary web platform or you are interested in vertical market software that requires it, Drupal might be the right choice.

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WordPress is used to create 1 in 3 websites on the Internet today and that percentage is growing every day. If you are not already aware of WordPress and how it can act as a great platform for your small business website, then read on. This article will discuss what WordPress is and what its benefits are. WordPress is the world’s leading Content Management System, or CMS. A CMS is just a fancy term for a program that let’s you edit your own website. (more…)

Email marketing can be a great way to reach customers, but it can be very difficult to capture your reader's genuine attention without looking like spam or a sales pitch. Who wants to put a ton of time and effort into email marketing when their emails are just going to get ignored, deleted or caught in a spam filter? There's a few tricks to successful email marketing for small businesses, which if done right can increase not only your conversions but also your website traffic, search engine rankings, etc. Plus, it's one of the most effective free-of-cost marketing tactics out there. Read on to discover the top 5 tips for email marketing geared specifically toward small business owners.