Using images in your content helps you express ideas, attitudes, and sentiments, all the while improving communication between your brand and your audience. But images can only help you do these things when you choose the right ones.

When you choose poor or low quality images, your audience might find them ambiguous, bland, or, even worse, inauthentic. And you don’t want that.

Let’s explore how to identify images that support your message and elicit a positive response from your audience. We’ll focus on images from popular stock repositories that are affordable for most small businesses.

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Web typography baffles many business owners and WordPress developers. What fonts and font layouts are most appropriate in a WordPress theme – and how should you evaluate the plethora of options at your disposal?

While there isn’t a catch-all solution to the typography question, one thing is certain: typography should help your readers to obtain value from your written content – not discourage them. To identify typography meeting that specification, pay close attention to the following:

1. Readability: Reading your content should never be a struggle. It should be effortless and natural.
2. Appearance: Typography should have a clearly defined hierarchy, contrast, and spacing among content areas.
3. Errors: Some themes omit, overuse, or combine certain typographic styles. You should avoid themes that do this.

Think of these issues as a checklist where each item informs the quality of a theme’s typography. When you’re evaluating WordPress themes, typography should always meet these benchmarks! Let’s examine each issue in greater depth so you can identify WordPress theme typography that works for your website.

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Google Analytics offers a multitude of data-related features for websites serving nearly any imaginable purpose and targeting all kinds of audiences. And best of all, you can start using it today, free of charge!

There are numerous helpful tutorials on the Web that show you how to use the different tools in Google Analytics. At the end of this post, we’ll direct you to some Google Analytics-related articles that we think are relevant and practical for WordPress users.

But before you start perusing the pie charts, line graphs, and spreadsheets available in the application’s UI, it’s important to figure out what to monitor. Otherwise, you could face information overload – not to mention a lot of time tracking metrics that have little to do with your goals.

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If you love helping others learn and are an all-around enthusiastic, accountable, motivated communicator, come work for us!

The Theme Foundry is hiring a full-time Community Manager. You’ll work as part of a small, distributed team that’s deeply committed to building beautiful, functional products for WordPress users. At The Theme Foundry, we’re focused on learning, discussion, and clarity – especially in writing! Our Community Manager will value these things, too.

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Identifying the perfect WordPress theme for your business website requires time, tenacity, and – this one might surprise you – restraint.

While there’s a seemingly endless array of gorgeous WordPress themes at your disposal, choosing one isn’t a decision you should base solely on aesthetics. A business website, after all, doesn’t exist just to look nice; it’s a tool that should help you generate revenue.

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Earlier this year, we published a post about how to find the best WordPress themes, whether free or premium. That post speaks to some of the issues you’re likely to encounter as you scour the Web for themes. It provides guidance on subjects like:

• where to search for free themes and how to identify the highest quality (and most secure) choices among them
• the difference between theme marketplaces and independent theme shops
• how to gauge the quality of a WordPress theme provider

However, one thing we don’t cover in that post is why you might prefer a readymade free or premium theme to a custom WordPress design, or vice versa. There’s the obvious response to that question – that everyone would prefer a custom theme if they could afford it – but we think the initial cost difference isn’t the only issue. There’s so much more to the story!

Whether to invest in custom design is a question many bloggers, freelancers, and small businesses using WordPress wrestle with. Let’s look beyond upfront cost and consider all of the factors that should influence this important decision.

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About, About Me, About Us, Who We Are, Our Story, Meet the Team… the humble About page comes in many different flavors. Despite being stylistically different, all serve the same fundamental purpose of telling your audience about you – in other words, showing them what you’re about.

So, does your website need an About page? We think most bloggers, special interest organizations, and small to midsize businesses using WordPress should publish an About page in some shape or form; the reasons are twofold:

1. Authenticity and trust: There’s a reason why About pages are among the most visited pages on many websites. Your audience wants to confirm that you’re genuine and, if you’re selling something, that you’re someone with whom they want to do business.
2. Brand awareness: What better way to call attention to brand attributes than with a page that celebrates them? The About page is your opportunity to showcase your (or your organization’s) identity.

Let’s run through a few crucial steps that will help you create an About page that’s useful to to your audience and bolsters your brand. Not every About page is the same because no two publishers have the same goals. To know what kind of content should appear on your About page, you have to know what you’re trying to achieve. Which brings us to Step One…

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Have you ever wondered why an image looked better before you published it? If you’ve had this experience, managing image quality in WordPress can seem like a frustrating, if not bewildering, endeavor. What’s happening to your images between leaving your hard drive and appearing on the web – and how do they get so blurry?

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At the Theme Foundry, we strive to provide an effortless, enjoyable experience to everyone who visits our website. It’s with this objective in mind that we recently completed – and launched – our latest website refresh. Check out the home page if you haven’t seen it yet!

While the home page was the focus of this design update, every page on our website underwent several modest adjustments.

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Many bloggers rely on responsive design. A responsive website can help you seamlessly deliver content to a variety of devices and accommodate all of your readers.

The thing is, choosing the right responsive theme isn’t as simple as identifying a design labeled “responsive,” uploading it to WordPress, and clicking “activate.” Evaluating responsive WordPress themes actually requires careful testing, quality analysis, and diligent attention to how a design treats your content.

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