Hi guys, I have identified two niches for me to setup my first two blogs in and have already started writing quality, unique content for them. My SEO and marketing strategy have also been planned in advance as well as an email marketing campaign. Now, I have a good idea of what I want these to look like, but none of the themes I have looked at seem to meet my requirements. Is it worth looking into having a custom theme designed instead and what can I expect to pay for this sort of work? I know very little about design and the time involved so I am not sure whether the investment required would be out of my budget or not. The site would be what I consider to be quite basic; standard 5 page website email/newsletter signup form ad blocks rss/social networking buttons buy button for ebook It would, however, need to be search engine friendly as I need to do everything possible to get this position 1 page 1 on google! Any ideas? Anthony
I think it would be cheaper to go with Artisteer to create your own theme, then you would be with paying someone. Especially if you're just starting with this site, and it hasn't made you any money yet. On the other hand, if you're sure this is going to be a winner, you could invest some of your money in a theme designer, but remember that it can be expensive. Leslie
Hi, I am confident that both sites will make money. Still, it might be a little premature investing a considerable amounts of money on theme designs. When you say it can be expensive, how much are we talking? $250, $500, $1000? I know it will depend on my requirements but I think $250 for each site to get a custom, if basic design thay I can upgrade over time would be money well spent. Anthony
I think you should be able to find someone for that price, you will need to do some searching off course. I'm sorry, but I don't have any names I could give you, if I had I would. Leslie
I have had a look at Artisteer and it looks quite promising, though I have no doubt that a theme designer could do a much better job! Might be a good halfway house between a standard and custom theme for the time being though. Thanks for the help, Anthony
This free theme is relatively customizable and is pretty involved for a free wordpress theme. Check it out and see what you think: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/atahualpa
Hi, Thanks for the post. I believe I stumbled across that theme on my web travels and I kind of liked it. I think I just want something unique though, that no-one else has. One more Q please guys - I have a very talented web designer available who I work with and can also code HTML/CSS. I want him to do my design but he has never used Wordpress before - Is it feasible to get him to do it and then get a WP coder involved? I am concerned that he may design something which is difficult to then code, considerably increasing my outgoings as a result - What do you think? Anthony
There are lots of good people who can take PSD designs and code them to WordPress. Probably a number of people on DP in the programming forum have the skills to do so. Obviously the quality does vary, I'd recommend not necessarily going for the cheapest coder you can find, but look out for someone who produces clean and quality code with limited validation errors, etc. As for XHTML/CSS to WP, this can depend. In most cases, the XHTML/CSS code is pretty much unusable and I usually just end up coding it directly from the PSD anyway. This isn't always the case though.