SidekickBlog

I have reached the limit of the Cutting Board Wordpress theme that we launched Recipe Mobile with.  It was a good theme to start with as it was my first experience with Wordpress and the theme came customized to use on food and recipe websites.  However, the theme seemed to have issues with Internet Explorer right from the start and these issues were only compounded as I continued to customize it and add plugins.  The final straw was when the category pages started going out of whack when viewed in IE or Chrome.  There also does not seem to be any forum, documentation or support to help solve problems with this particular theme.

I considered buying a professional Wordpress theme for the website.  However the issues with picking this option were:

• Most of the good themes are very highly priced (Over $65).  Considering that Recipe Mobile is still new and not completely monetized, I was unsure if I wanted to invest so much.
• Some of the better free themes seemed to be a lot more attractive than a lot of the premium ones.
• Most of the professional themes are purposely created to appeal to a large variety of niches.  This means that all of them would have to be highly customized (styling, functionality & images) to make them fit the food website category.
• There are tons of premium themes available and it hard to identify the good (Good does not always mean popular as it has to customize well to your individual website’s requirements) ones without actually giving them a try and the demo does not say much about the functionality.

For all these reasons, although I know that I will eventually have to, I have decided to not invest in a premium theme at the moment.  Instead I will be trying out one of the better free themes that are not pre-customized for food websites.  This will give me experience in customizing themes and understanding the aspects that are important to my website.  Also, I am considering switching to a magazine style website and I might give that a try before investing in a theme.

After a lot of searching, I have shortlisted the following 3 free themes to consider for Recipe Mobile:

• Mimbo 3.0
• Thematic
• Simple Balance 2.2.1

I will be using the awesome Theme Test Drive plugin by Vladimir Prelovac to test the new themes without disturbing the experience of current readers.  The new theme will probably be installed within the next couple of days and and then I will start the customization process.  If there is a demand for it, I might also document some steps of the process here.  Stay tuned for the updates.

Update:  Mimbo 3.0 will be the new theme used on Recipe Mobile.  Read here to find out why.

I would like to hear your thoughts about the advantages (if any) of premium themes over free ones.  Also, do let me know suggestions of free and premium themes that have worked well for you.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.