Themes are tools that are of great importance to a self hosted WordPress blog. There are literally millions of different themes for you to choose from, on the internet. A nice theme is crucial for the looks of your website. It is almost certain that you will want to visually appeal your readers and make them like your website in order to come here more frequently, presenting you with the chance to accomplish your goals easier. You can choose between simple blog themes or more advanced magazine templates, responsive templates that adjust to different screens, HTML5 templates, Flash templates, corporate templates, etc…
Theme pricing and customizability is an important aspect to think of before you select the one that you will install on your WordPress platform. Prices differ from free to pretty expensive themes, like 100$ or more depending the under the hood technologies they implement. The customizing options that the template you like has, must also be an important choosing factor. You have to agree that if you buy a theme that has limited customize choices, you will most certainly end up messing with php coding in order to customize it the way you like. A theme can instantly change by going to your WordPress Dashboard, on the menu Appearance and then Themes. There you can install multiple themes and select whatever suits your website the best.
The Importance of a WordPress Theme to Your Income
So, why is it so important to install the correct WordPress theme for your website? Most people stick to the really fancy ones, with huge sliders, pretty carousels, high definition graphics and tons of information for the reader. The truth is miles different though, if we are talking in terms of moneytization of a website. I mostly agree that if you want to create a magazine website or something similar you would need to stuck much information on every page in order to keep a user as much time as possible on you website. That means that you will probably moneytize your website as a 3rd party publisher gaining money from user impressions, or maybe from CPC type text ads, like Google Adsense.
But this is the one waywhat if you want your user to accomplish an action? What if you want your user to buy something, or fill his email to a list, or make a social action (follow, like, +1etc), or even leave a comment for you.
This is called, Conversion Rate(CR) and it is measurable, so you need to start thinking how to increase it, in order to fulfill your goals and increase your earnings! You have to clear this on your mind once and for all. A reader needs to be told specifically what to do on a blog post. This is called Call To Action(CTA) and its measurable also. Various statistics and measurements have been done, proving that a single page with only a button in it can obtain an increase of over 2000% on the CRs of a CTA. Lets pause and think of this for a momentwould you like thousands of users that do nothing on your site, or hundreds of users that do whatever you tell them to do?
Why v+j success team Uses a Simple WordPress Theme Like Socrates
Like i previously mentioned, when you want your reader to accomplish an action you need to guide him and hide all distractions like sidebars with multiple widgets and banners, social network sharing plugins, etcYou want your user to stay focused on the Call to Action you present to him!
Socrates theme is simple, but very flexible and easy to customize for any need you might have. You just have to put your activation code after a regular WordPress Install. It has the usual magazine templates with sliders and big images and easy to implement placeholders for your Adsense code or any other ad you might promote. You can find literally thousands of header images to put there and they can be changed with the click of a button. A really nice feature of Socrates theme is its integration with any Clickbank product you might promote. There is also pre made spots for your social networks and the ability to rotate your leaderboard banners on a time sequence.
Another cool feature of Socrates WordPress Theme is the ability to install Googles Custom Search for your website search. It has also no sidebar templates, ready sales page templates, squeeze page templates and more. In this WordPress theme you can find multiple shortcodes to use with different size, different color buttons that include 5 stars reviews. You can see the use of Socrates WordPress Theme on this blog right here and on the images below.
Review of Socrates WordPress Theme
This is the main demo screen of the Socrates WordPress theme. As you can see there is a wide header image that can, really easy, be changed to a custom image of yours or you can choose from hundreds available for almost any niche through Socrates header exhange system. The menu bar gives you the choice between the default search function or the Google Custom Search Engine(AdSense included) for you to use on your site. Under the menu bar is a placeholder for your leaderboard ads and there you can rotate a maximum of 3 different clickable ads. Next to the leaderboard placeholder is the default social placeholder for your social media and this can be rotating too. You can even choose to have a nivo slider, that will show your featured posts, on your home page.
You have 3 different home layouts to choose from with Socrates. The Magazine 1 , the Magazine 2 and the normal blog that will only show your blog post timeline. The Magazine 1 home layout comes with a nivo slider that will present your featured post images in 640w to 250h dimensions making it an impressive addition if youd like to use it to draw users attention to specific posts. Under the slider there is your normal blog post timeline with a featured image on the left and a quick preview for the user to choose what to read. This layout comes with a left or right 300 px sidebar where you can insert widgets, banners or whatever you might like.
Magazine 2 layout presents you with the same slider. Instead this time your home page splits vertically to 2 different blog post timelines. You can find the normal blog post timeline with a little featured image and the blog post title on your left. On your right there is a blog post timeline from your featured category showing a wider image. In my opinion this is an even better choice if you want to focus your readers on the featured category blog posts, because your featured blog posts take a lot more space in front of the reader eyes in this layout. As always there is your regular 300 px sidebar, on your left or on your right.
Socrates gives you the choice to have a no sidebar layout. This is better used if you want to focus your readers to a Call to Action behaviour through your blog posts. No sidebar layout has no widgets, banners and various shiny stuff that will distract your readers interests. Use this layout if you want to increase your Conversion Rates and your income.
Portfolio layout is a great addition for you to present your personal or business work. It comes as full width with no sidebars and there is a featured image and a preview of your blog post there. This is better used for specific circumstances like the ones mentioned previously.
This WordPress theme comes with 2 predesigned sales templates for you to choose from. These layouts can be used for your convenience instead of going out there and creating your own sales page or hire a programmer to create one for you. The sales page templates can be used if you have a product, ebook, video course or something in general to sell to a user. Using these templates you can incredibly focus your readers to the CTA you want them to have. Its like either you buy or dont buy50 50 chancesThere is the normal sales page template with a header menu and a skinny sales page template with a tiny menu on the end for you to choose how to play.
The Squeeze page templates that included in Socrates theme might be the most important addition. Squeeze page templates can be used as a landing page in order to obtain a detail from your reader, like his email. Landing pages play the most important role when it comes to Internet Marketing strategies and promoting your products. As you might be aware of, an email list with happy fans of your business can bring you a lot of money if you use it wisely. Socrates comes with 2 squeeze page templates. A simple one, text based with an email form on the right and a more complex one that gives you the choice to input your video and some html code in there.
Shortcode Buttons can be used throughout your website in different sizes and colors. You can even insert a star rating over your buttons to make them look more prestigious. This is a nice feature you can use without any other additions.
Socrates comes with a handy, elegant contact form with many options for you to use on you website. You can customize it to have multiple types of choices like dropdown menus, checkboxes, radio buttons, captcha and more. This contact form can be customized as to which email should the details be emailed to when a user uses it to contact you.
Here we are, at the end of this blog post and v+j success team managed to obtain another special gift for our readers!