Top 3 Preferences When Choosing A Theme

[Kit]

Heh. I was thinking that's the way you had it set up. Sounds like a good arrangement and a win-win situation all around.

[Len]

I'd have to agree that appearance (CSS and graphics) mean nothing as that can easily be changed. Like Ryan, I tend to look for interesting features that I can study and incorporate in other themes.

[andrew]

I was going to say I only cared about the look because I would tend to replace a lot of the actual coding but I realised reading everyone else's posts that I was making an automatic assumption that it would be well designed for the target audience, compliant, accessible, clean HTML, good typography, relatively standard (to web standards types not to framework types) classes and IDs and let me see all the details before I got on board.

To be honest, it would be a very rare theme that I would consider using myself because everything I do gets hacked to bits.

[BlaKKJaKK]

I am actually looking at my options for a new theme. I run a very visual blog so I switched to the Unstandard theme back in July and for me it was a major mistake. It improved click through for older posts but killed my Google traffic. With so little text on the home page it just jacked me. It took me a while to connect the dots.

My list right now is

1) W3C complaint code. If the code isn't complaint with W3C, it's not a good sign the person took the time to do it right.

2) Clear, concise CSS file.

3) Structure. I am still learning HTML and so its better if I can focus on mainly just changing CSS.

Right now, I haven't found much that fits. So I am thinking of using Justin's Hybrid and just starting with the Skeleton theme and building my own child theme. That's bit more work than I want to do but it probably will be the only thing that makes me happy.

[greenshady]

I actually don't download too many themes for use since I prefer to build my own, but I do like to take a peak under the hood of other people's themes once in a while.

1) Typography (if the theme has decent typography, I'll look into it further).

2) Validation (there are simply no excuses for a theme to have invalid code -- leave that to the theme users).

3) Clean code (should be the top priority for any theme, but the typography and validation have to be there before I look at the theme's code).