Section 2: Assessing Quality

This is Part 2 of a 3 part series on choosing premium themes to use with Wordpress web sites. If you missed Part 1 you can see it at:

Choosing A Premium Theme For Your Wordpress Web Site, Part 1

In Section 1 we covered setting expectations and deciding on what you really need from a theme. In this section we're going to look at some areas you should pay close attention to when you find a theme you like.

As mentioned previously, there is no standard for premium themes. The term "premium" means different things to different people. In my opinion though,it's still reasonable to expect a high level of quality in a theme that you pay money for.

The question becomes.... just what is a high quality theme?

As with many other things, "the devil is in the details". You will need to throughly examine the demo page, source code, tutorials, and any other details a premium theme creator offers when looking for the measures of quality listed below.

Valid code

One way you can assess a theme's quality is to see how it stacks up against industry standards. You can use online tools to compare the page construction to specific code standards. The HTML markup validator (http://validator.w3.org/) should be run on the key pages, including the home page, single post page, category page, etc. If all goes well you will see a statement that says the page has passed. If it fails, the validator will report the number of errors.

The CSS validator (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/) only needs to be run on the home page, because the CSS style information will be the same across the entire site.

The CSS validator will normally list both errors and warnings. Usually you can ignore the warnings, and getting errors doesn't necessarily mean the theme is a bad one. There are some situations where errors simply cannot be avoided; however, you should generally expect few errors.

Browser compatibility

All themes should be compatible with the major browsers. The author should provide you with info about the browsers their theme is compatible with. If the author's website doesn't say his themes are compatible, you should ask rather than assume.

Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari and Opera are the main browsers a theme should be compatible with. Test the theme in as many browsers as possible to determine if there are things that don't quite work the way they should on any particular browser. Be skeptical of a theme that doesn't look just right in any of the major browsers.

Styling

In any web site there are a lot of different elements that can be designed with a specific look and style. Perhaps there are different styles for each level of header or perhaps pull quotes are treated with a special graphic. Check to see if these elements are styled in any theme you're considering. That will give you a good idea of the level of detail the theme author has included.

Look through the demonstration pages for examples of the following:

• Headers, levels 3 to 5
• Blockquotes / pull quotes
• Code blocks
• Tables
• Numbered lists
• Bulleted lists
• Nested lists
• Definition lists
• Images, particularly the spacing around them if they are included within the text
• Links (click on links to see how they behave and how they look after being clicked)

If the demo site doesn't include an example of these in any of the posts or pages, then contact the themes author and request that they add a post that contains them. You just never know, for instance, when you might need to include a table, and there is nothing that looks worse than a poorly styled table.

You can see examples of some high quality premium themes and some fully operational demo sites at iThemes Premium Wordpress Themes.

There normally will be a default style for all of these items, so it is unlikely they will be unstyled, but you're really checking to make sure you're satisfied with the way these elements are styled.

Typography

One thing a theme must do well is to make your content easy to read. A good theme designer will have considered the type in some detail to decide what is an appropriate font size and line spacing, among other things.

The following points are a general guide to assist you in determining if type styles and sizes are appropriate.

First, simply read through a few of the pages. If you find them difficult to read for any reason, then that's an obvious indication that something isn't right.

Another thing you should look for is a regular rhythm. Consistent spacing between paragraphs, headers, and lists will create a rhythm on the page that makes it easier to read. Frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages can be used for judging rhythm because they most often have a number of headers and short answers all visible on screen at the same time.

Finally, it is a good idea to compare the theme's typeface to some sites you regularly visit and read to see if it stacks up and decide whether or not any differences are warranted.

Comment styling

If you plan on letting users leave comments on your site, you should check the way the comment section works. You can leave a few comments on the demo theme to see how it handles comments.

Trackbacks are pretty useless when they appear within a comment thread. Most readers don't like wading through piles of trackbacks to find the comments in between them. A well thought out theme would separate them, or at least provide that as an option.

It's also good practice to make the authors' comments appear different than those of visitors and to include gravatars (globally recognized avatars) for every comment. If you're planning on using the site for business, you probably will want to have the option of turning the gravatars off. Be sure you find out how the theme handles that. Does it leave an empty space, or does it look as though the gravatars were never there?

You should also check to see how a theme handles a post when comments are turned off and whether or not it displays a message when comments are moderated.

Pages

The Wordpress theme API allows specific page types to have their own templates. This feature means the information that is displayed on a page can be tailored specifically to the need. You should visit the following types of pages and see how the themes author has used this functionality:

• The home page (see if it is the same as a single post?)
• Any single post
• A category page
• A tag page
• A static page (such as the about page or contact us page)
• The search page
• Monthly archive page
• Sitemap (If there is one)

When viewing these pages you should pay particular attention to the content of each post; i.e. is it an excerpt or is it showing a full post? Full posts might possibly make your site less effective with search engines since you can have multiple pages with the same content.

You should also pay close attention to the way you navigate between pages. Are there links from each post on the category page to the monthly archive page, or to the tag page for the tags that apply to that post? If there is more than one page of results, are the default next/previous page links used? Hopefully the theme author has gone that little bit further and included a list of page numbers so you can quickly navigate straight to page five?

Next, check the error pages. What happens when you search for a term and there are no results? What shows up when you change the URL to try to access a page that doesn't exist, or a post that doesn't exist?

Pay close attention to the details as well. In addition to post titles, does it also display authors, dates, categories, etc.? When it gives an excerpt of a post is there a user-friendly "read more" link of some type?

Most of these cases apply to blog-type content, but even if you're not all that concerned about blog functionality you'll probably want to see how the pages use the sidebar or widgets. For instance,is the sidebar the same on every page or is there some type of variation?

Theme options panels and commented code

It is quite possible that you will want to amend the theme to some extent, so you need to know how easy it will be to do that. Hopefully,the theme will provide you with a Theme Options (administrative) panel that will let you swap out images, change the feed URL, add in tracking code, choose between various color schemes, or control your menu. You will definitely want to know the details concerning the functionality that would be available to you without changing any code.

When you do need to change the code, a great theme will provide detailed comments in the source code to make it as easy as possible. Since comments will rarely show up in the source view, you won't be able to check this without the original files. It can't hurt to ask the themes author for a sample of a relatively standard section of code so that you can see what kind of comments it contains.

As you can see there's a lot of things for you to think about here.

It's not likely that a theme will be perfect in all of the points raised, and different theme authors will have different views on the importance of each one. It's therefore possible you may have to compromise on one feature in order to get another more necessary one.

At this point in time, you should know how to gauge a theme's quality, which will be a tremendous help in picking a theme that is right for you.

In the final part of the discussion, coming up in Part 3, we'll consider the value of a good theme.