Avoid forking out thousands for bespoke or custom-built themes, which often result in a worse website anyway.
A good off-the-shelf premium theme can still be configured and customised as much as you want and can give you a perfect “million dollar website” for a tiny fraction of the price, even for free!
Getting a bespoke or custom-built theme for your WordPress website, done properly, is extremely expensive and this is rarely a good investment.
First of all they cost many thousands initially. They then cost far more in the long-term to update and maintain to keep them running smoothly with all the latest updates of WordPress and the many required plugins, etc.
Furthermore, even with all this expense, custom-built themes are rarely tested, scrutinised and refined to anything like the same extent as a quality, established theme such as a Genesis child theme on the Genesis Framework.
Why “off the shelf” WordPress themes are actually far better as well as far cheaper
If you choose carefully from the thousands of off-the-shelf themes out there in order to find one that is…
- high quality
- well reviewed
- as close to what you want as possible, by default
… then you’ll make things much easier for yourself and end up with a far better website.
Furthermore, if you are prepared to spend between maybe 20-200 GBP/USD you can get a vastly superior premium theme, with the following benefits…
- choose your favourite from hundreds of design templates in the form of “child themes” or “skins”
- this can be used as it is, just replacing the demo content with your own (i.e. changing the text, images, menus, colours, logo, etc). This is the easiest approach and the one I recommend on my courses if you want to keep things easy, simple and cost effective.
- alternatively, these “child themes” can be used as merely a starting point, allowing you to tweak or completely transform all and any aspects of the design you like (e.g. fonts, layouts, etc). This can be more technical and time consuming to do, but is still far preferable to getting a completely custom theme, built from scratch.
- the best premium themes are part of a larger “parent theme” or “theme framework” such as Genesis. See all the benefits of the Genesis framework and why it’s the best foundation for almost any WordPress Site