10 things to keep in mind before selecting a theme

- Decide on the category/mood of your blog.
See what type of blog you’ve got already. And select a theme from the appropriate category(many template stores have this).
You would see an appealing theme in the theme selector but you wouldn’t want to apply a heavy artistic theme to a technology blog.

- See if you have a theme that will feature/support all the blocks your existing blog has.
i.e - Blogrolls, Technorati, Links etc.
If they don’t have these blocks, then see if there is space in the template so that you can incorporate it manually.

- See if the theme designer has a copyright license and has specified in the instructions on his site that the links to his blog(mostly in the footer) be maintained. If so, carefully study them. If you don’t want to link back to him, then better select another designer who is okay not linking to him.

- See if the designer has put in unwanted codes into the template, like affiliate links, redirection pages or even Google AdSense ads! They will not benefit you or even may harm you - so better stay away from them. You can find this out by comparing the source code with that of your existing blog.

- Test the skin on different screen sizes(800×600, 1-24×768….1280×1024 etc) and see how it looks, it’s better if you can strike a balance between all the sizes, and not stick to a theme because it works well on 1024×768, it may look ugly on another one.

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