14 DAY TRIAL // The content published on professional-looking websites will be better understood by visitors and will generate a higher traffic, also determining the users to return. In the same way, to get a high quality blog or website powered by the WordPress platform, the theme structure will influence to a great extent the visitors' perception relative to the website content.
A WordPress theme includes the templates file responsible for the content display and the XHTML and CSS files that determine the structure of the website layout (as in any other content management system, content publishing or editing is separated from the design of the website).
Any professional WordPress theme must be unique and compliant with the web standards. They can be constructed by manually editing the necessary code for templates, XHTML and CSS files, by customizing ready made WordPress themes or by using a theme generator.
If you do not have any PHP, XHTML and CSS coding knowledge, you can easily customize a ready-made theme by following the guidelines indicated by help or code comments, because usually almost all professionally made WordPress themes are distributed with help or tutorial files and the code lines are very well commented. You will find high quality free WordPress themes (valid from the point of view of web standards) by browsing the following sites: WordPress Themes, Chromatic Sites, TemplateXtreme and SkinPress.
On the other hand, the WordPress theme online or desktop based generators allow the creation of unique and standard compliant themes in only a few minutes. For example, on a Windows operating system, the WordPress Theme Gen application enables you to make modern CSS driven themes (XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant) with only a few clicks of the mouse.
The online WordPress theme generators are free to use and provide multiple theme customization options like sidebar location, number of columns, menu layout, copyright notice and more. Online generators can be found on websites like Wordpress Theme Generator, doTemplate or CSSEZ.
In any case of WordPress theme customization, the images and other resources used (like buttons, CSS color schemes) must be of high quality. The final result will strictly depend on the characteristics of all elements included in the WordPress theme.