Basically I hate designing themes. I usually end up spending days and days tweaking the CSS to get the columns floating over to the correct place and only find it doesn’t work on a different browser (i.e. IE). The process starts over again until I get it working for all browsers.
Like I said, it takes days to develop a new design even when I start with a proven baseline. So I stopped. My time is too valuable to do something which I can outsource or pick up a professional looking theme from Woo Themes.
But sometimes I get an idea for starting a new niche and dream about what theme to use even before I’ve worked on developing the content. I know that it is going to take a couple of months to get ranked in the SERPS and the only ones really looking at the sites are bots. Anyway the dreaming lasts for a few wasted hours causing nothing but grief when I could have done productive work.
After the content on the site is aged, I install one of my canned themes I use for Adsense or eBay depending on the type of niche the market falls into.
Lately, I’ve been looking (dreaming?) into updating my canned niche themes using Thesis. I just need a simple design that I can baseline without spending days reinventing the wheel again every time WordPress comes out with a new version.
However after just reading Lis’ Frugal Theme Review, there may be another platform other than Thesis which you can quickly customize including:
- Frugal’s ability to have unique pages layouts with either no sidebars or sidebars unique to that page. In fact you can develop an entire business website using WordPress pages only with these options.
- Frugal Theme’s easy use of images which uses WordPress’s native support for thumbnails which means associating a thumbnail with a post’s extract as simple as clicking one button.
- Frugal’s ability for you to choose colors for your text and backgrounds by either using a color picker tool or by typing in the hexadecimal code (much easier to get a number of different elements exactly the same color by typing in the code).
- Frugal Theme’s code is very efficient – that means its fast loading on your website – a factor which Google is taking more and more into consideration.
- There is fantastic support for Frugal from the detailed step by step videos from the developer to an active support forum where questions are answered quickly.
While I’m more familiar with Thesis, I’m going to have to take a second look at Frugal. It looks like you can produce some really professional looking sites that I can create that are basic and simple for my niche sites.