WordPress is a wonderful choice of content management system for your website, whether you run a business, organization, or it is just for personal use. Even if you aren’t very tech-savvy, it’s very user friendly and most hosting companies offer it as a one-click setup so you don’t need to worry about creating databases or editing code files. There are hundreds of plugins to add things like contact forms, social media, photo galleries, shopping carts, and more! Best of all, WordPress (and most of the plugins available) are offered free of charge! How is that possible? It’s licensed under the GNU General Public License, and is supported by the open source community. If you are having any trouble with WordPress, the help forums are a great place to start. Just make sure you check the FAQ and do a search first, it’s quite likely that your question has already been asked and answered!

So you have a WordPress site set up but you aren’t really feeling the default theme and you’d like the site to match your branding or personal style. I have good news for you, there are plenty of themes out there that you can install with a few clicks without having to know any code at all. There are typically tons of options given in an easy to use graphical interface so you can add your logo, change colors, and hide or add elements (sliders, sidebar widgets, etc) easily. Absolutely no HTML or programming skills necessary! Some of them are free to use and some of them cost money, ranging from $10 to upwards of a couple hundred dollars. You can also hire somebody to create a completely custom theme for you, but then you are looking at around at least $500, I’d be wary of anybody who said they could do it for less. The free ones are typically meant to work ‘out of the box’ with only a few options given for customization, whereas paid themes usually have a ton of options and can be customized quite extensively.

We’ll review some of our favourite free and paid themes on this blog, happy browsing!