A WordPress theme determines the way your website looks -- the layout and organization, colors, fonts, and many other details. The choices can be overwhelming. Here's my experience.
"Year" Themes
Your site will probably start out with one of the default "year" themes. Those are the ones named Twenty Twelve, Twenty Fourteen, Twenty Fifteen, Twenty Sixteen... you get the idea. WordPress comes out with a new one each year. You can be sure these are well-supported.
Great! So that makes your theme choice a no-brainer -- get the latest up-to-date year theme, right? Well, not exactly. Each year theme is designed to fit a somewhat different niche. One might be good for displaying a gallery of images. One might be stark and edgy. One might be light and clean. An earlier year might work better for you.
Also -- as I was setting up in the fall of 2015, there was a Twenty Sixteen theme available, and it looked pretty good. But when I read the support forum (see below), it became clear that it wasn't quite ready for prime time yet. They were still working on it, and there were many reported updates and glitches. I decided to try it later, but not right then.
The WordPress Theme Directory
Luckily, there were -- and are -- literally thousands of other free themes to check out. The safest source is the WordPress Theme Directory. You know these themes have been reviewed by the WordPress people, and are free of malicious code. You can browse, or search for certain criteria.
For instance, you can type writer or author into the "Search themes" box, and narrow the candidates to 30-50 themes which WordPress thinks are particularly well-suited to author websites.
Or you can use the Feature Filter, and select for the colors, layouts and other features you want. Here's what I checked, and why:
Responsive layout -- this means your site will work well on smartphones and tablets, as well as desktop computers. More and more important these days.
Right sidebar -- because we're used to reading left to right, our eyes start at the top left. I want my reader's eye to see my content first, and then move to menus and other supporting items after that. You may well make a different choice, though.
Custom background, colors, header and menus -- to have a few easy easy-to-make choices available. If you're brave, you can dive into CSS and child themes, and customize even further -- but I'd rather start small.
Threaded comments -- looking forward to conversations on the blog, someday
That narrowed the choice to a couple hundred themes. You can narrow it down more, if you have strong feelings about colors, numbers of columns, and so on. Or you can broaden your choices by looking at Commercial Themes reviewed by the WordPress people (which you have to pay for) or venturing out into the wilds of the internet. For what it's worth, I stuck with:
Free themes (because, as you know by now, I'm cheap frugal)
Themes from the WordPress Directory (because I like to play it safe)
How will your website look? Experiment and see.
The themes look beautiful -- but I had an awful time visualizing what my website would look like, without all their graphics and professional tweaks. You can click a preview -- but I still had a hard time understanding how it would translate to my website.
You may not have that trouble. But luckily, if you do, it's quick and easy to download a few themes to try out, and quick and easy to switch from one theme to another. I recommend test-driving a few, right at the start, and playing around. Trial and error.
You can always change themes later, too -- but different themes have different options, and I'm guessing you may lose some fine-tuning if you've been working on your site for weeks or months. Your content should stay the same, though, and you can always go back and retweak. So don't worry, this isn't an irrevocable decision.
Check what other people say about this theme
Here's another factor to consider when you choose possible themes -- other users' experiences. Does the theme have bugs? Will the developers help you out if you run into trouble?
If you hover your cursor over one of those theme images, a box saying "More Info" pops up. Click on it, and you will indeed get to a page with a lot more information about that theme -- a brief description of what it offers, a graph showing downloads per day and total downloads, so you can see how popular and well-tested it is, how many stars users give it, links to preview, demo &/or the theme homepage, and a link that says "View Support Forum."
When you go to the support forum and look at the reviews and questions, you can get a sense of how buggy the theme is and how quickly the developers respond to user questions (or if they respond at all.) If there have been no posts by the developers for months or years, they may no longer be updating and supporting this theme -- something important to know.
So, what did I pick and how'd it work out?
I decided to try good old Twenty Twelve, and it was fine. But once Twenty Sixteen was ready for prime time, I switched to that, and liked it better. It seemed especially good with the "responsive" stuff -- making my content look good on phone or tablet, as well as computer monitor.
Still, when I got around to organizing my static web pages, I found that I just couldn't lay them out the way I wanted, within the framework of that theme. And there were some appearance issues I didn't care for. I might have been able to adjust them using CSS and a child theme, but I wasn't ready for that yet.
So I took screenshots of my pages in Twenty Sixteen, and made notes on all the settings and customizations I'd picked -- just to be sure I could get back to where I was. Then I played around with a few other free themes from the WordPress Theme Directory.
And now I've settled on a theme called Vantage, in conjunction with a plugin called Page Builder by SiteOrigin (both are free from SiteOrigin.) That seems to be an extremely customizable combination, and so far, it suits my needs and I'm very happy with it. If I change again, I'll update this post and let you know.
So, that's one person's experience. If you find a different theme that works well for an author website, could you share your experience in a Comment? Thanks!