Picking a theme is sort of like picking an outfit - that you need to wear for a long time.

Granted, WordPress makes it easy to change themes. But once you put all your tracking codes into your current theme then you have invested a lot of time and effort. When you switch you will have to do all that again.

The WordPress theme viewer is a good place to start. There are many themes to choose from and you can sort by different criteria (although I have been having trouble with the sorting function the past few days).

One of my favorite sites for themes is Rockin Themes and at the time of this post I am using the Rockin Web 2.0 theme. Another good post that I came across is by Dosh Dosh and features 18 Adsense Ready Themes. One final theme that I like is Cutline. I have not put any of these themes into real practice yet so I cannot vouch for their ease of use but they are very appealing.

With so much to choose from I just may have to try on a few outfits before I make a final decision.

As I mentioned before, I am not a coder. But I like to take theme and tweak it a bit to make it look sort of customized. Maybe change some of the colors or the column widths. So it is important that the theme is simple enough for me to understand.

The header is also a tricky area. This is thing that all your visitors see first. I want to be able to make it my own. Some themes make this easy others - no.

Then there is all that behind the scenes stuff to consider. WordPress 2.2 has widgets built in which is great for newbies like me. But in my current theme, if I use the widgets in the right sidebar then that very cool RSS button disappears. This one I have got to figure out.

If you plan on running ads on your site then an adsense ready theme may be the way to go. These themes apparently make it easy to drop in your adsense code and have your ads appear with little effort on your part. That can be a time saver.

Finally, some themes advertise that they are search engine optimized. This probably has to do with all the meta tag stuff that I have not yet figured out. But I know enough that high search engine rankings equal a lot of visitors so SEO friendly is also a must.

These are just some of the thoughts going through my head as I evaluate various themes for this blog and one of my others. If you have any insights I would love to hear them.