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WordPress Themes: Know Your Audience

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WordPress themes usually come with powerful and easy to use options for visually compelling features. For example, image sliders and carousels are usually included with these themes and provide you with standards-compliant, reliable ways to show off image content. Before you get too carried away, however, be sure you’re using the right theme and the right options for your audience.

Sometimes It’s About Accessibility

In some cases, you’re likely to have an audience that is not going to appreciate sliding images, fancy text effects and other enhancements to your site. For example, if your site is directed at senior citizens, many of your readers may have issues reading your site if there’s too much variety in terms of fonts or if you choose a background color that makes your fonts harder to read.

On WordPress themes, there are usually plenty of font options to choose from. Your typography, if your audience is likely to not appreciate fancy fonts with a lot of serifs and other ornamentation, should be simple and dense. This makes it easy for people to read. Simple fonts like Arial and Verdana are both great choices for visitors who need the written material to be as accessible as possible.

Where image sliders and carousels are concerned, for visitors who may not have an easy time reading the screen, slow down the transition times on your images or go with a manual slider. Over stimulating your visitors with images that change to rapidly or text that changes out too rapidly to be read is almost certain to send them packing.

The Regular Crowd

If your readership is younger and more familiar with the web, the above mentioned concerns will not play as vital a role in determining how you need to select options for your site. For sites that have a readership that doesn’t have issues with reading text on a screen or dealing with images that change quickly, the content you choose for the flashier elements of your site is much more important.

If you have a WordPress theme with built-in image sliders, be sure you choose images that are worth having features. It’s better to have fewer images and to make them of a higher quality than it is to have mediocre images sliding across your homepage.

Your image selections should be relevant to your posts, as well. Ideally, the image in your slider will be included in the post to which it is linked, providing consistency and making it apparent to the user that they arrived at the right page. Some sliders allow you to include teaser text with the image and this is a great way to entice people to actually click through to your article.

Change Your Images

The images included in the slider on a professional WordPress theme are usually very easy to switch out. Do so regularly. Nothing will make a site seem stale better than a selection of images that never change. These are usually the first things that people see when they come to your site and, if those images never change, they might assume that your content doesn’t change that much, either.

As long as you take your audience into consideration, the enhancements that you’ll find on WordPress themes can be used to great effect. When you’re selecting a theme, make sure you take your audience into consideration, as well. If you’re going for a crowd that isn’t likely to appreciate fancy fonts and lots of image content, go with a theme that gives you a lot of control over typography and that has a simple default post layout. If your audience is the opposite, look for a lot of layout and graphic options in a theme.

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