Do you want an up-to-date web site with the latest super-cool techie bell or whistle? Don’t we all?  And WordPress: it’s so contemporary, versatile and inexpensive. So, pick a theme already, and get to it! (A WordPress “theme” is the design template that determines layout, type, color, etc. for your content.)

But wait a sec. I’ve found that there are huge differences among themes, differences that are invisible until you start working with them. Choosing a sloppily constructed one, or one that isn’t updated, can be an expensive mistake. Here’s how to pick the right one.

Premium (Paid), or Free Theme?

There are thousands of free WordPress themes. For a long time, all themes were free. And some of the free ones have problems. Issues I’ve encountered include:

• Themes that “broke” when I upgraded WordPress
• Coding so sloppy that basic customization was a humongous job
• Standard features that didn’t work

This being said, if you have simply a plain-vanilla blog, or simple blog plus a few static pages, and you don’t need a custom look, many free themes will work just fine. A good place to start looking for good free themes is the WordPress site:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

But if you’re planning a more complex site—for example, you need a content management system (CMS), a magazine- or newspaper-style front page featuring many items, an e-store, a digital portfolio, a real estate site, or a photoblog, selecting a theme is much tougher. You need a specialty theme which has the appropriate features already built into it from the start. For these more specialized and complex sites, as well as for any site that will require extensive customization, I would tend to look at a premium theme first.

Premium Themes

It took me a long time to warm up to the idea of paid premium themes. Now I’m a convert. Most premium themes are cleanly coded, work well, and are regularly updated. Prices generally run from $20 to $80 or so for single-site use. Some wonderful themes I’ve worked with come from:

Ithemes: specialized premium themes including magazine, real estate, ecommerce and online gallery/portfolio (I have used several of these themes and am an iThemes affiliate)

Themeforest: many well-designed specialty themes, updated at the discretion of their authors.

Woothemes: many magazine- and news-style themes, with support. (I have worked with several of these am an affiliate.)

The Market Theme: one of the top paid premium theme specially designed for ecommerce (I am an affiliate). (For more on ecommerce and WordPress, see my article “Ecommerce: How to Choose the Best Shopping Cart for Your Site.”)

Theme Frameworks

Recently, “theme frameworks” have come on the scene. These are basic themes which offer the ability to customize the design using more mouseclicks than actual code. (Here’s a somewhat technical intro with a discussion of the pros and cons of each major framework:  including some that are not mentioned here.) So, they’re highly adaptable to your particular purpose, and suffer few update problems. Three of the most popular theme frameworks are

Carrington (free)
Thematic (free)
Thesis (paid premium)
ThemeHybrid (free)

Thesis, for example, allows you to have either a magazine-style home page, a conventional blog page with either 2 or 3 columns, or a simple static home page, with a few mouse clicks and no programming at all.

End Theme Overwhelm!

There are thousands of gorgeous themes out there, and it’s easy to fall into overwhelm unless you have a plan. Here’s how.

• First, know what features you need in your theme and cannot compromise on.
• Then, troll for templates that already have all or most of those features, designed by reputable sources with a good track record in providing working themes.

You’ll end up with a handful—or maybe just one or two—themes which offer the features you’re looking for. At this point, cost might be a deciding factor. Or you may want to experiment among the themes on your short list to find the one that works best for you. Don’t sweat the final decision. If you’ve done your homework, any of the themes on your list will make you happy and serve you well for a long time.

Have you ever chosen a theme that broke? That you love? I’d love to hear your experiences.

Does your site feel boring, outdated, and passé… because you’re sick of its colors? Do you want to revamp it, but don’t know how to go about choosing new ones, or even whether to try?

It’s worth the effort. Your web site has ten seconds to make an impression. Color is a plays a critical role in that decisive moment. And color is not only how people get drawn into your site, it’s how they recognize and remember it to come back.

Color Provides the Visual Cues that Are Key to Having a Memorable Site

Do you need a designer’s help to get started picking a great color palette? No! Here’s a simple worksheet for choosing a complete color palette for your site.

1. What feeling(s) do you want your business to convey? Express this in a minimum of three, and a maximum of six, words.

2. Does your business currently use distinctive colors—in its logo, business card, storefront, etc.—that “must” be used in your web site? Add it, or them, to your potential palette now.

3. Think about warm colors (yellow-orange-red-brown) as opposed to cool colors (green -blue-indigo-violet-gray). For example, blue is a frequently used in business because it creates a sense of calm, trustworthiness, solidity and confidence. However, it is “cool” rather than warm. If one of your chosen adjectives was “warmth,” or if you have a “people” business, blue might be better used as an accent rather than a major component of your site.

Red, the quintessential “warm” color, conveys vitality, health and playfulness. But it also can imply a sense of urgency and alarm. Many colors are ambiguous in this way, with meanings and associations which vary from culture to culture. Keep in mind any strong color associations of your potential audience(s). An excellent short article by Rob Mills on how color communicates meaning is here.

4. Right now, choose a “draft” palette of 5 or 6 colors (a palette is a collection of 3 to eight colors that work well together). You can use swatches from the local paint store, colored pens, a scanned image which contains the colors you want, Photoshop—whatever you feel comfortable with. There are some very helpful online tools as well. I like Adobe’s Kuler, and Color Scheme Designer, both free. (And yes, this should be fun!)

5. Consider contrast. Bright, strong, and dark colors work well for headlines. Very light colors make lousy headlines, but can make wonderful backgrounds. You can lighten or darken some colors on your palette for the sake of contrast. Getting stuck? Browse sites you admire, and observe how they have used warm and cool, light and dark, bright and dull.

6. Check for readability. Is your color vision normal? Approximately 15% of the general population have some kind of distortion in the way they perceive color. There’s a good visual simulator of various kinds of color blindness here. Your site needs to be legible for these folks. Modify accordingly!

7. Will people be printing out your web pages? If so, use dark type on a light or white background for the printable versions.

8. Now, let’s get down to business. It’s time to finalize at least two strong colors which can predominate on the site. Designate another one or two that can be used as accent or background colors. It’s better to have too few than too many colors—designer Roger Black, for example, gained international fame for his distinctive magazine designs using just black, white, and red, period.

Once you’ve done the right-brain choosing, and the left-brain tweaking, you’ll have a color palette that you can use on any site or template. Still aren’t satisfied? Try one of the online palette-creation sites mentioned above. Or, look at photos (travel photos are especially good), paintings, or design books for more ideas. The book Living Colors: The Definitive Guide to Color Palettes Through the Ages, is a particularly good source—authors Hope and Walch have extracted gorgeous color palettes from the art and décor of many ages and places, which can all be adapted for the web.

But above all, have fun. Color appeals to a primal part of us, and its meaning and impact can’t be fully explained. So savor the inexplicable. If you’re enjoying it, chances are your site visitors will too.

Have you experimented with color palettes, or found a really helpful color-picking tool? I’d love to hear from you.

What’s involved in a web site redesign? A little, or a lot. It depends upon two things:

(1) what your goals are, and

(2) how the site was created in the first place.

Your Goals

I’ve helped people redesign their sites for a lot of reasons:

• Adding features to an existing design. 
• Wanting a more flexible system that allows them to change and update the site themselves. 
• The site feels totally outdated and limiting; they want to redo the whole thing. 

The first step in a redesign is figuring out what your real needs are. Are you looking for higher sales, better data collection, easier purchase process, more clients, more memberships or subscriptions, fewer customer service calls, no more emails asking the same questions over and over, etc. Do you need your site to express who you and your business are now, not who you were five years ago?

Make a list, and prioritize what you want from a revamped site before you start.

The First Secret: Design

There are three parts to any web site redesign: the design, marketing, and technical aspects. All of them tie into and effect each other.

First, is the actual design portion. This includes:

• Adapting new content or technical options without compromising an existing design, or
• Creating a completely new site, including layout, navigation, colors, typography and imagery.

The Second Secret: Marketing

Second is marketing. By “marketing,” I mean the entire user experience created by the combination of content and visual interface. Questions to ask yourself here are,

• What actions do you want people to take on each one of your pages?
• How are you persuading them to do this?

“Marketing” is tied into every aspect of your site, from the visual look and feel, to what kind of payment system and shopping cart you choose. A redesign is the best opportunity you can have to think about how your users’ experience can be enhanced—added to, simplified, clarified—in ways that grow your business. You want every page on your site to steer the user to a single action, whether it’s to sign up for your mailing list, purchase a product, or simply click to the next page in a sequence.

“Marketing” also encompasses the selection of keywords and keyphrases that you use to get organic and/or paid search results. If you need professional help to determine your keywords, by all means, get it.

The Third Secret: The Technical Portion of a Redesign

The technical area is the most difficult one for many non-technical people to assess, and yet it too can determine the success of failure of the site. It can also be the source of large unexpected costs. We’re talking here about:

• What scripting language(s) your site is constructed with—HTML, PHP, CSS, Javascript, etc.
• Where your site is hosted,
• Whether your site is tied to a particular template system, like Shopify or Yahoo Stores,
• What software or platform is used to build the site—Dreamweaver, Cold Fusion, WordPress, etc.,
• How much flexibility is built into the site, 
• Whether you or your staff can alter and update it yourselves, and
• How search-engine friendly your site is (actual keyword and keyphrase deployment in the site, see Is Your Site’s “Invisible Sloppy Web Design” Sending Visitors Away?)

There may be cost (or other) advantages to making changes in one or all of these areas during a redesign. Web technology changes very fast, and what was effective five years ago may no longer be the way to go now—or tomorrow. Some designers know nothing about business needs; some programmer-types know nothing about creating a visually pleasing site. You need to work with someone who is aware of the benefits to you and your business of planning ahead for maximum flexibility.

Bottom Line

A redesign is an opportunity, a moment when careful planning and analysis now can save you hours of effort and a bundle of money down the road. Sometimes, the word “redesign” is a misnomer, because you’re really creating a whole new site. In other cases, a redesign is exactly what’s called for to fix or add to a working site.

Whichever route you take to revamp your small business web site, your designer—or your design team, even if that’s just you and your designer (or just you!)—needs to understand the trade-offs among the three key areas: esthetic, marketing, and technical. Handling these three areas well will give you a site that can be phenomenally successful.

More Web Redesign Resources

Two of the best marketing-type guides I know to putting together a successful small business web site are Sufi master business coach Mark Silver’s Heart Centered Web Sites, and marketing coach Robert Middleton’s Web Site Toolkit. Both will tell you what kinds of pages you need and what kinds of language or “calls to action” to use in order to create a site that improves your business.

If you’re just starting out in business, I also recommend that you pick up a copy of Middleton’s Infoguru Marketing Manual. It covers the basics—how to talk and write interestingly about your business, and exactly what tasks to do to market your business. Yes, I am an affiliate! I’ve been using and recommending Middleton’s products for nearly ten years because he’s made such a huge positive difference in my own business.

Do you wonder how to start a web site—whether you should hire an expensive designer, or use one of the off-the-shelf template systems that promise an “overnight site”? It’s a decision that can paralyze people before they even begin their business. And many clients have come to me some ways down the road, realizing they made the wrong choice and their business is suffering for it. When you’re just starting out, how do you know what kind of web platform to choose?

Is your vision modest, or ambitious?

One business owner I work with, Jim, runs a huge web site selling workshops, e-books, audio downloads, hard copy books and DVD packages. This site is the source of most of Jim’s income. But three years in, Jim found his template too restrictive, even though he spent a lot of money to customize its look at the beginning. Updating the store was very tricky (one expert Jim hired accidentally brought the whole site down for a week), and expensive. Jim felt frustrated that he couldn’t easily create custom landing and sales pages for co-branded products and events he was developing with colleagues. He couldn’t “escape” his template. What could Jim do to make his site work better for him?

Another client, Deborah, is a bodyworker with a large long-time clientele. Deborah, unlike Jim, simply wanted a place to display her office info, briefly explain her techniques and philosophy, and announce special workshops from time to time. She has no merchandise to sell, nor is she interested in developing any. Ever! Deborah sought a very simple web presence with zero maintenance. Does she need to pay a designer for a totally custom site?

Do you have the budget for major changes?

Jim’s livelihood depends upon developing products based on his expertise, and selling them online. After I started working with Jim, we decided to migrate his entire site to a custom Dreamweaver-based design which, along with 1shoppingcart, allows for a unique look, and relatively easy updating and alteration.

The ubiquity of the platform means that anyone who knows html and CSS can easily modify his site. As his needs evolve, he’s not stuck forever with one design, or one designer. In the long run, this new setup saves Jim money and gives him the flexibility his business needs in order to grow. However, the time and expense of porting the whole site over could have been avoided, had Jim known the restrictions of his original choice.

Deborah, on the other hand, knows herself, her clients and her business—and she knows she’s not going to going to need more than a “brochure” web site. We set Deborah up with a simple WordPress template whose blogging platform offers a quick and easy way for her to announce special events and workshops without knowing anything about web technology. She isn’t likely to outgrow this site for many years… but if she ever does, the WordPress platform offers enough flexibility for her very small site that a complete “redesign” will be neither time-consuming, nor expensive. This is a good decision for her.

Are you particular about color, layout, look, branding?

Another client, Terry, wanted a masculine, professional look for his business consulting site. Terry is a do-it-yourselfer who’s often in a hurry. To create his first site, he purchased a template package which included a number of design and color selections, one of which matched the look he wanted. However, after spending six hours one afternoon trying to figure out how to position an image in precise alignment with the text on a page, Terry called me in frustration. It took me another hour to determine that the package Terry purchased didn’t allow the fine level of control that Terry was after.

Terry had made an impulsive decision, which, luckily, didn’t cost much money. However, it cost him a good deal of time before determining that he needed a more customizable platform. For many of us small business owners, time is the most precious commodity of all.

Which brings me to the last question.

Do you have the desire or expertise to modify and update your own site?

If not, is the expertise required to help you change your site widely available, or is your platform so unique or “techie” that you’ll have to either find a super-specialist, or pay someone for their learning curve? This happened to a client, Thomas, who bought an expensive blogging system which did everything he needed, and offered lots of flexibility. But, you had to be a programmer to run it!

Thomas is not a programmer, and he discovered too late that unfortunately, experts on his platform are few and far between. Thomas couldn’t make simple changes himself, so he procrastinated on his updates and got way behind what his active mind was able to dream up. His income was suffering from the limitations of his web platform.

After Thomas and I began working together, we migrated Thomas’ site to a WordPress platform, with a custom design. Thomas now happily does all his own modifications and updates, and is quick to take advantage of the latest plugins to add cutting-edge functionality to his site.

The best of both worlds

For many years, a custom Dreamweaver site was the gold standard of small business web design. However with the explosion of database-driven content management software, this is no longer the case.

Open-source blogging and content management software such as WordPress and Joomla have matured to the point where they offer the best of both worlds: flexible design platforms, plus the ease of ready-made templates (which exist by the thousands).

You don’t need to be a blogger to take advantage of these systems. These days, more designers are working largely, if not exclusively, in CMS systems like WordPress to create ordinary business and ecommerce sites as well as blogs. And if you’re a do-it-yourselfer, these systems let you handle a lot of your own updates without needing to know any code at all.

So what should you do?

If you need a small, quick, inexpensive site which you don’t expect to grow—and you aren’t fussy, or really like a ready-made template design—go with an inexpensive template system. There are very simple WordPress templates for small business sites, as well as many available from reliable providers like Yahoo Stores and GoDaddy.

If you’ve got, or plan to have, a large, unique, and constantly changing site which makes money from merchandise, and you have no interest in doing any updates or maintenance yourself, a fully customized site, whether using a CMS/blogging system or not, will give you the flexibility you need in order to grow. Hire a designer and get to it!

Finally, if you’re a do-it-yourselfer with big ambitions but starting on a shoestring, a WordPress site is the perfect choice.

Now more than ever, business IS change. Your focus, your processes, your technology, your products, your services, your interests, your employees—which of these isn’t continuously evolving, shifting, changing and growing?

To cite an extreme, one of my clients was called crazy for moving his retail location four times, to three different cities, in his first ten years in business. But during that time he built a thriving business and a loyal clientele. Recently, he’s had such great success with his latest move—putting his business online—that he doesn’t have to maintain any brick-and-mortar retail location at all.

Those who risk nothing, gain nothing. How can you create a web presence that changes and grows with your business… and continues to enhance your image, effectiveness, and profitability?

Old, Inflexible Web Technologies

Some web technologies create web sites that are much more difficult to alter later. In earlier web days, there wasn’t much choice among site technologies. You’ll often find these in legacy sites, and in poorly designed sites as well.

1. Nested tables. Altering the structure of a site with tables can be time-consuming (read: costly) beyond belief. Until recently, most sites used nested tables, so don’t be alarmed if your site does too. Just make sure any new site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for layout, rather than tables.

 2. Graphic sites. Even recently, I’ve worked on sites that were nothing but Photoshop files exported as jpgs. To change the tiniest comma on one of these pages means opening a Photoshop file, making the change, re-exporting the file as a jpg, piecing the page back together, and loading it in the browser to verify. And doing that whole process over if for some reason the page didn’t look as it should. If you’re trying to update the site and don’t have the original Photoshop files, you’re out of luck… you’ll need to re-create the entire page from scratch. If you have one of these sites, replace it!

3. Flash. Flash is a way of creating animations that look very slick and gorgeous on the right site. But can be difficult to find a developer who knows how to work well with Flash, and a site that is built entirely from Flash is not search-engine friendly and is tough to update. Unless  you’re an architect, videographer, filmmaker or game designer who really needs cool animations on a site, use Flash sparingly.

Building a Web Site That Can Change and Grow with Your Business

On the other hand, there are technologies that lend themselves to allowing easier alterations down the line. I’m talking about common, ubiquitous site-building tools; nothing that requires custom programming or is beyond the budget of most small businesses and creative entrepreneurs. 

Some of these tools, like CSS and include files, can often be grafted on to an older site to extend its lifespan. Others, like Dreamweaver templates and WordPress or other blogging/CMS platforms, are best implemented as part of initial site construction.

Here’s a quick list of common technologies that can bring more flexibility to your web presence:

1. Dreamweaver templates & libraries. Dreamweaver has been the web site workhorse for the past ten years. Even with a table-based site, Dreamweaver templates can make site-wide alterations much easier. Using Dreamweaver templates to set up your site, you can:

• Instantly make site-wide changes in things like background color, headline styles, or minor layout adjustments.
• Add or subtract menu items, sidebar, header, or footer include files.

CONS: Dreamweaver templates tend to be error-prone and temperamental to create and maintain for large sites. Implementation and updating requires Dreamweaver. And they’re very difficult to apply to a preexisting site, so they’re best included from the beginning of the design process.

2. Include files. This is a way of including a smaller file within an html or php page, such as a menu that appears on every page of the site, a header, a footer, etc. The main benefits of include files are that:

• Updating these site-wide “include” files requires only one file change, and one upload. In some ways they’re easier to manage than Dreamweaver templates because, for a large site, you only need to upload one file per change, rather than reloading every single page in the site.

CONS: sometimes require special URLs & host setup, so best to be added as part of the initial site (.shtml vs. .html) Because include files can become unwieldy if there are a lot of them in a site, they’re best used for clearly demarcated functions, like a navigation block, or an ad block, rather than for general layout.

3. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS has tremendous versatility. With a site that’s been set up in CSS, you can:

• Alter the entire layout, color scheme, type size and spacing by changing one CSS files alone. Check out Zen Garden for examples of how changing CSS code (and artwork) can create completely different “looks” for the same material.
• Create visually rich and varied designs that would have been impossible using old-style web pages.

CONS: CSS can get very complex. Trouble-shooting can be quite tricky.

4. WordPress or other content management system (CMS). With most of these, you can:

• Easily migrate your site to other blogging or CMS platforms
• Change the theme (look) of your site in minutes
• Quickly add and configure plugins and new technologies
• Automate your site with auto-archive and auto-RSS capabilities
• Add content with no html knowledge
• Post to your site via email

CONS: WordPress or another database-driven site can be costly and labor-intensive to customize. If something goes wrong, you may need a programmer to troubleshoot.

If you’re planning a revamp, or creating a new site, it’s important to think about the issue of flexibility up front, and talk about it with your designer. You’ll save time and money down the road with a site that’s easier to update… and, your bottom line will benefit from a site that stays current with what you’re actually doing in your business.

While  we can’t predict all the changes and adaptations we’ll be called to make in the coming years—who knows, the next generation of web sites might be 3-D spaces accessed with virtual reality goggles instead of monitors!—at least for the foreseeable future, your business will be more likely to prosper in changing times with a site that has the ability to grow and change built into it from the start.

What do Martha Stewart, Discover Magazine, the NFL, the Royal Navy, the Wall Street Journal, and Danielle Steele have in common? They all use WordPress.

But these are mega-money megastars. And besides, you say, I’m not a blogger. I don’t want to have to write every day or even every week! So how can you, the entrepreneur, small business owner or sole proprietor, benefit from using WordPress over hand-coding a traditional site?

Here’s the thing. Blogging software—any blogging software—automatically handles chores that traditional, hand-coded sites (yes, we can call five or ten years “traditional” on the web!), built with Dreamweaver or other coding programs, need lots of human attention—i.e. time and money—to do..

• A blogging platform allows you to publish to the site without knowing or doing any html or web coding
• You can change the total appearance of your site with—literally—one click
• The software automatically publishes your updates as an RSS feed (more on this in another article click here to learn how RSS can make your life easier)
• And most wonderfully, blogging platforms automatically archive your published articles without any action whatsoever on your part.

But Why WordPress, Rather Than Blogger, Moveable Type, Expression Engine, or Some Other Platform?

A couple of years ago, the choice wouldn’t have been clear-cut. Now, more top-100 bloggers use WordPress than any other single platform. It has evolved from a promising but clunky tool, back when I first encountered version 1.0 in 2003 or so, to a thriving, highly extensible platform that has managed to maintain its accessibility to the novice user while offering professional-level technical and design sophistication. It’s a stand-out among blogging platforms.

The 18 Reasons I Recommend WordPress to My Clients

1. It’s free. There’s nothing to buy, no subscriptions, no editing software needed.

2. Ready to use, right off the net. All you need is a web host.

3. Infinitely customizable. You can download a selection of free themes—and apply them yourself, instantly. Or, you can purchase premium themes for special purposes (real estate site, business site, ecommerce site, etc). Or, of course, hire a designer to create your own custom look, feel and function.

4. You can easily create, organize and update your own site, without knowing any coding.

5. Like other blogging software, it automatically archives all your posts.

6. Like other blogging software, it automatically creates RSS feeds, and pings the services of your choice when you update your blog.

7. You can publish to your site via email, or your phone.

8. You can use it to podcast, videoblog, photoblog, or write.

9. You can also use it to create a totally non-blog site or an integrated blog-plus-conventional-site.

10. Reader comments can be configured in a variety of ways to enhance the sense of community on your site.

11. Twitter, microblogs, and other new platforms can be integrated into your WordPress site easily.

12. It’s continuously updated and supported by a huge team of users and developers.

13. It can be quickly extended to perform many additonal functions via hundreds of plugins.

14. Can be updated automatically… no need for tricky reinstalls.

15. Comprehensive support and instruction, both written and video, is widely available at little or no cost.

16. It’s very SEO-friendly. Traffic, traffic, traffic!

17. There’s a quick learning curve.

18. And last but not least, has an easy-to-use admin interface.

With all these advantages, why would you use anything else for your blog or site? That’s exactly what I started thinking, and why I have redesigned this site in…guess what?…WordPress.