This is the seventh article in our Making an Author Site with WordPress series. If you already have your WordPress theme done, you can skip to the next section linked at the end of this article.
With an author site, you’ll want your content to be easy to read as it’s the focus of the site. We have some general tips in our Starting a Website – Theme article that will be of help. However, you’ll also want more specific tips for an author site.
For my FictionalRealms site, I chose “Courier New” because it looked like typewriter font and is easy to read. You’ll want to make sure you also find a good font if you don’t like the default font. Don’t get too crazy or fancy with the content body fonts though because your readers will have a hard time reading your articles and you’ll lose subscribers.
The default Twenty-seventeen theme is pretty good as it’s simple and allows the focus to be on the articles. You can make a child theme and edit it to change colors, fonts, font size, etc. This is how I changed Fictional Realms and is the recommended method for making theme changes in order to avoid issues when upgrading.
If the default theme just isn’t what you want, you can easily load a theme from within the Appearance > Themes area in your WordPress admin panel. Just be careful what you choose. Try to find a highly rated one that isn’t too heavy to load. Test the theme demo (don’t get one without testing a demo), and make sure it doesn’t hang or overwork your browser or computer. It helps to also test from a mobile device.
Some themes may look really cool with all sorts of features like sliders or nifty image animations, but those can be very heavy. Remember your readers. You are making a blog that focuses on your writing, not on all sorts of bells and whistles. Too many of those and your readers will be focusing on the theme instead of the writing.
If you’re still not sure about WordPress themes, our clients can drop us a line in our BryZar support portal.
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