What Comes First – Theme, Logo or Design?

WordPress is a great platform to build your website on.  Yes, it started out as a blogging platform however with the fantastic developer community that has grown up around it, WordPress is so much more.

Once question that I have been asked about using WordPress recently was:

What is the best way forward – buy a WordPress Theme and then get your logo and website header designed to use in the theme or do this the other way around? Can most logos and headers be integrated into WordPress Themes or should they be specially created to “fit” a specific theme?

Firstly, the difference between a logo and a header….

A logo is generally a graphic that is representative of the ‘business’ whilst a banner may include the Logo but also other details.

Where Do I Start?

For a quality look and feel, I recommend the following approach:

1. Decide how you want your site look.  Where do you want your header banner, navigation and footer elements to appear, what content do you want on your homepage; what do you want the ‘pages’ of your site to look like…. you don’t have to be detailed – I often just use a pen and paper and do a basic line drawing.
2. Decide on what you want to appear in your Header banner – some people want a basic banner, others want a ‘Call To Action’, some want rotating content, a sign up box… etc
3. Decide on the colours that you prefer….

This will give you a ‘picture’ of what to look for in your theme.

Then, look at the themes that exist that might be customized to look like your picture.

I strongly recommend that you look at a Premium Themes, as opposed to free themes – see my earlier post on this: My Top 3 WordPress Themes.

If you can find a theme that matches your picture, then start there.

You can then create a banner that best suits the theme you choose….

To answer the other part of the question – Can most logos and headers be integrated into WordPress Themes or should they be specially created to “fit” a specific theme?

In many cases a header banner can be integrated into an existing theme, providing the width of the theme matches the width of the banner.

If the theme is wider than the banner, resizing the banner to fill in the blanks will likely reduce the overall visual quality…

If the theme is narrower than the banner, then it will be possible to reduce the banner to fit and not affect the visual quality.

Overall Conclusion

In a lot of cases a banner will be able to be across a number of themes – just pay attention to the width and height of the banner you’re using.

However, in a few cases you may want to have a banner designed to work within a specific layout.