What features do you look for in a Wordpress theme?

The first time I read the features of 1Blogtheme, I knew I wanted it for my blogs. It was simply too cool. I installed it in Sassy Lawyer on trial, was happy that despite the insane amount of code in the templates I managed to customize the theme so I decided I would install it on this blog and in Pinoy Cook. I did two days ago.

Then, my server started to slow down. I wasn’t really worried. It’s nearing Christmas and traffic peaks in any decent food blog at around this time. I’m on a dedicated server and bandwidth and webspace usage are things I don’t think about much because I know that I have more than what an individual blogger usually needs.

The slowdown had not improved by lunchtime yesterday and I started to feel lazy because I was having a hard time uploading photos. I decided to take a break, got The Alchemyst by Michael Scott and started reading in bed. Too many late nights, too little sleep and the cool weather… I fell asleep without getting through a single page of the book. I didn’t wake up until almost sundown and only because my cell phone was ringing. By that time, the server was dead. My blogs were gone and I couldn’t access the administration panel of the server. And I couldn’t get Yuga on the phone because, as usual, he was keeping vampire hours by sleeping during the day and getting up only after dark.

When he finally picked up the phone, the long process of elimination began. What caused the problem? Even the tech support people in the Texas datacenter weren’t sure. I started enumerating what I thought could have killed the server, ranging from the logically probable to really far out possibilities: 1) I put up the Noche Buena blog on December 10 and, by this time, it would be in the SERPs; 2) I had a tiff with GMA 7 and they hired someone to hack into my server; 3) Pinoy Cook might have been mentioned in an article in some big publication like The New York Times and the referring traffic was too much (it happened before, the traffic was insane but there was no recent mention)… Then, it finally hit me. 1Blogtheme.

The very reason why I liked 1Blogtheme so much was probably the same reason that the server couldn’t handle the load. Too feature-rich and some of the features would have been magnets for spammers and sploggers. As soon as the server was up, I reverted back to my old themes and the server started to stabilize. Of course, some other things could have happened that caused the server to go down and I’m just not aware of them yet. But I’ve been monitoring the server and nothing unusual has happened for the past two or three hours AFTER I got rid of 1Blogtheme.

If you’re a Wordpress user, what do you look for when choosing a theme? Personally, while aesthetics do count a lot, I like themes that maximize the features of Wordpress as a content management system. Themes like that can be created only by people who are not only artistic but who are also accomplished coders. A Wordpress theme, after all, is a combination of precise measurements, pretty colors, a good amount of white space and the correct usage and placement of codes. 1Blogtheme wasn’t much of a looker but in terms of features, it was the bomb. But it isn’t for a high traffic blog like Pinoy Cook — that’s really inviting trouble.

At any rate, Sassy Lawyer is still using 1Blogtheme but only because it is on another server, a shared server with Dreamhost, along with Pinoy Moms Network and HedCen.Com, both of which are due for major revamps during the Christmas break (no rest for the wicked).