WordPress themes are one of the CMS’s most powerful features – by designing a theme for your website, you can completely transform how it looks and breath new life into it. But how should you go about designing a new theme? What kind of colour patterns should you choose? Where should you place the navigation menu? There are millions of small decision you make when designing a theme that comes together to form the final website – it is far from easy, but with our tips, you’ll be able to learn how to create the perfect theme for your website.
#1 How to Choose the Colour Scheme?
The colours you choose to represent your website are of paramount importance – colours not only determine the aesthetics of the website, but they will also influence the users’ emotions and are important cues. Depending on the type of website you want to create, you need to choose colours that are either warm or inviting, exude professionalism, communicate style, etc. The colour scheme should match the purpose of your website. You want a welcoming colour scheme for an educational website, but you want a more professional colour scheme for a business website. You should try out different combinations until you find one that’s right for you.
#2 Navigation: How Easy is It for Users to Navigate Your Website?
Your goal from your website should be making sure the user remains on your website for as long as possible and hopefully buys your services/products. It’s then a really good idea to ensure your website is easily navigable and all your high-value pages are accessible from the navigation menu. Navigation is one of the most important elements on your website, and it gets displayed on every single page. If your navigation menu is badly designed, your website will look worse, you’ll see a decrease in traffic, and you might even face declining revenues. At the bare minimum, your navigation should follow best practices:
Comprehensive: the navigation menu should be comprehensive and allow you to visit all the vital webpages on the site – you need these pages to be easily accessible if you want to successfully sell your products and services.
In-sync with the rest of the design: the navigation will appear on all the web pages, it is your job to ensure it doesn’t look out of place in any of them. You need to keep this in mind as you design the theme as a whole and as you design individual pages.
Responsive and intuitive: the navigation menu is the most used element on your website, and you want it to be responsive and intuitive. It will increase user satisfaction and make your website more accessible.
#3 Choosing a Theme Fitting for the Website’s Functionality
There is no one-size-fix-all solution when you’re developing your website’s theme. The functionality of the website, the demographic you’re targeting, and your budget all should influence how you approach designing the theme. If you have a large budget and have a massive project you want to invest in, then it makes sense to go all out and hire animators and graphic designers to create something truly unique. If you’re targeting old and rich people, it makes sense to make the design professional and simplistic with agreeable colours. If you are a designer but don’t know how to write code, you should use a a PSD to HTML conversion service offered by Acclaim service to get your website off the ground. You need to make sure you’re using the right tools and investing the right amount of resources and time into your project!
