When it comes to WordPress 2-column themes, people seem to fall into one of two categories: left sidebar or right sidebar.   Which do you prefer?

I’m not sure which is better, but in browsing through my 2-column WordPress theme gallery, one of the first things you’ll notice is that theme designers seem to prefer releasing themes with a right sidebar.   Is this a coincidence or do theme authors find that they get more downloads with a right sidebar?

I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I know that most “A-list” bloggers use 2-column themes with the sidebar on the right, so I suspect that this has something to do with the trend.  I know from my personal experiences that I prefer a right sidebar because I feel it looks better and creates a much more friendly experience for readers.

David of CyberCoder argues that people that have advertising on their websites should use a left sidebar for their 2-column theme.   His argument is that heat maps show that people read from left to right and your advertisements are more likely to get noticed on the left side.  While this is probably true, most advertising these days seems to be moving away from PPC advertising and more towards direct advertisements.   This is why the few theme designers that offer 125×125 banner slots on their themes are getting a ton of downloads.

So, what do you think?  Why do you prefer to use a 2-column theme?

I’ve been talking a bit about the need for free theme designers to spend some time building more advertising spots into their WordPress themes.  They are really in demand right now and there is currently a lack of themes that provide them out of the box.

Recently Daniel of Daily Blog Tips released the GreenTech WordPress theme, which is available for free to any interested WordPress users.   The theme was created by a friend of mine, Mayank Gupta of ReviewSaurus, as a way to showcase his design talents.

First, here is a quick look at the theme:

I think this theme is going to become extremely popular over the coming months in the same way that the BloggingPro theme did for much of last year.  Here are the features that Daniel lists:

• Advertising Ready: The theme comes with six 125×125 banner spots on the sidebar. You will just need to upload the banners to the theme “Images” folder and update the ads.php file.
• Easy Feedburner Integration: The “Theme Options” section inside the WordPress control panel enables the blogger to insert his Feedburner URL, which will be used all over the theme.
• Widgets Ready: The theme supports widgets, so just drop the ones you use.
• About the Author Section: The theme comes with a sidebar section dedicated to the author. You can upload your picture and a small description using the author.php page.
• Comments Styling: Author comments have a different style.
• Read More Tag Styling: The “Read More” tag is already styled and integrated into the design. Useful for bloggers that use post excerpts.
• Search Engine Optimization: The meta and title tags are already optimized for search engines.

If you are interested, you can view a live demo of the theme or download the theme.

There are a number of great free WordPress themes out there, but it is often difficult to make a quality 4-column theme. I’ve found that there is definitely a market out there 4-column WordPress themes, however, so when a good one comes along, you know that it will be heavily used.

Today I ran across a new quality 4-column WordPress theme from Blog Oh Blog called Techicon. This theme is widget ready, does a great job of blending the columns so it looks like a three column theme, and takes into account some of the latest trends from around the blogosphere.

As you can see from the screenshot above, this theme has a menu at the top above the header and features some of your blogs content at the top of the page, including popular posts, recent posts, and latest comments for your readers to see. It also displays the RSS feed in a prominent position.

If you’d like to give this theme a try, you can check out the demo and then download it here.

There are a lot of different variables when it comes to making a successful WordPress theme. It’s not always difficult to get people to actually download your theme, but it takes a little extra work to get them to stick with your theme for the long haul.

With that said, there are quite a few things you can do to help make your theme appeal to more people. If you release free WordPress themes, here are a few things I recommend you do to maximize the amount of exposure (downloads and inbound links) from your WordPress theme:

• Make a 2-Column Version and a 3-Column Version - This will allow your theme to appeal to both types of WordPress users.
• Browser Compatibility - Make sure your theme is compatible with IE6, IE7, Firefox, and Opera. If you aren’t sure of the best way to do this, I recommend using BrowserShots.
• Use a white background for the content area - Your average theme user prefers white backgrounds in the content area. I’m not sure of the reason for this, but studies show that the most downloaded themes have a white background in the content aera. I would presume this is because it allows users to easily add images that don’t have transparent backgrounds.
• Offer an attractive subscribe section - Users want to promote their feed, so offering an attractive subscription section will draw more people to download and use your theme.
• Keep it simple - There are a lot of really great themes, but browsing over the most downloaded themes, it looks like the simple themes are used the most often.
• Search Engine Friendly - There are quite a few things a theme designer can do to optimize the theme for search engines. Set up archives to display partial posts, optimize headers, etc.
• Integrate WordPress Plugins - I’ve talked previously about how to prevent WordPress plugins from breaking your blog. That same method can be used by theme designers to set up WordPress plugins to work out of the box. It is easy to do and will go a long way towards keeping people using your theme.
• Validate Code - Having a valid XHTML and CSS compliant theme will go a long way to help your theme impress potential users.
• Widget Ready - I was surprised at just how many people will only download widget ready themes. This ensures people with no coding knowledge can easily use your theme.

Other useful things to consider when creating your theme:

• Does your theme allow users to easily add advertisements? Themes with built-in spots for 125×125 advertisements are being downloaded like crazy right now.
• Is there an options page that will allow users with minimal coding knowledge to make adjustments to the header and other things?
• Do you offer the same theme with different colors?

What do you look for when downloading a WordPress theme?

I’m a big fan of premium WordPress themes and think they go a long way towards displaying the flexibility of WordPress. They also give many theme designers an outlet to display their creativity and show the quality of their work.

With that said, when the first few premium themes were released, they were designed to fill a void and make an affordable way for a small business to create a content management system (CMS) using WordPress. These first few designers found a lot of success very early, which prompted many other talented theme designers to release their own premium CMS themes.

Now, when I look over my premium WordPress theme gallery, it is disappointing to notice that these designers seem to have forgotten about blog themes. Most people that use WordPress are bloggers and are wanting to separate themselves from the competition, but don’t have any use for a CMS. Who is going to step up now and fill this void? There are a couple great premium blog themes available, but I’d like to see a larger variety to help blog authors separate themselves from the slew of blogs using free themes.

My hope is that the future holds more premium themes in 2008 that are specifically targeting bloggers. Build into it advertising blocks, 125×125 banners, and I have a feeling people will flock to it. Most of my sites don’t have a use for a CMS, but I could certainly use a well designed and optimized premium blog theme if it is significantly better than a free template.

One of Smashing Magazine’s first and most well received posts was a sort of WordPress theme gallery, similar to the galleries I manage and update here at Hack WordPress.  Now it looks like they’ve gone back to their roots with another post dedicated to WordPress themes.

This post is titled 100 Excellent Free WordPress themes, and it doesn’t disappoint!  There are a number of really incredible themes here, including a few that I hadn’t run across yet.  This weekend I plan to go through their post and update the appropriate galleries here on this site.  In the meantime, I recommend you click over and check it out!