Free WordPress themes offer webmasters using WordPress for their websites, an inexpensive mechanism to change the appearance their site and carve out a unique presence on an ever expanding world wide web. The look and feel of a website is of course, the first impression that is left with any web visitor who stumbles upon a webmaster’s virtual real estate. How does free WordPress themes play a role in developing this first impression? How does free WordPress themes play a role in internet marketing?
When launching this site (barrywheeler.ca), I started my quest to find a WordPress theme that would be clean and simple. I quickly found that there while there were many free WordPress themes, finding one that provided all the features (advertising, fast loading, clean, simple) proved to be a little difficult. It made me wonder what the pros and cons were of using free WordPress themes. Were there any advantages and disadvantages of using free WordPress themes.
The most obvious advantage of using a free WordPress theme is of course the cost. How can you beat free? There are many sites that provide professionally designed, free WordPress themes. In fact, even some of the professional design services also offer several free WordPress themes as teasers to larger more customized themes.
The most obvious disadvantage of using a free WordPress theme is also the fact that it is free! If the theme is well designed and very pleasing, you will find that may other sites will have downloaded and deployed this theme. Your website no longer has that look of being unique. This could distract from the actual content on a website and leave an impression that a site may be a low-quality site because it uses a free WordPress theme.
Sites that offer free WordPress themes do so for several reasons. Generally, these sites will offer themes for a small fee, as well as customization services of existing themes. The hopes in offering a “teaser” theme for free is that they will attract business. Offering their themes for free also attracts traffic to their website. This is a very strategic online marketing method where businesses offer an item for free, attract traffic from the search engines, and hopefully convert these visitors to paying customers.
Many of the sites will require registration to obtain the free WordPress themes that are offered. This allows the companies to build a database of email addresses that can be used later in other marketing campaigns. Such targeted email campaigns is another traffic building technique that is used as part of internet marketing.
Many of the free WordPress themes contain a link in the footer portion of the theme. This provides a one way link back to the website that was offering the free theme. One-way links such as this act as a vote of confidence in the site being linked to, resulting in a boost in relevancy which will in turn increase the search engine ranking of the sites offering these free themes. If you look at how many times that a particular theme has been downloaded, this mechanism can potentially provide a company with thousands of inbound one-way links.
With this site, I have deployed a free WordPress theme that I had, and customized the locations of several of the components. While I am not 100% happy with this theme, it does meet my immediate needs until I can either contract a developer to design one for me, or until I can get the time to develop my own WordPress theme.
A quick search on Google will shows many sites offering free WordPress themes. The following sites were the number 1 and number 2 sites displayed for the search term “free WordPress themes” in Google.
Thus, if you are looking for free themes during the launch of your site, or looking for a mechanism to increase your search engine ranking, free WordPress themes are options.
