When you are searching for a premium WordPress theme for your site so everything looks professional, you needn’t look any further than Thesis and Catalyst. All the top bloggers have one thing in common, they use premium WordPress themes that they customized. Thesis is the older player in the premium themes market, with Catalyst being a little newer. They are still very comparable, yet Thesis has a few things that Catalyst has yet to implement.

Premium Self Hosted WordPress Themes

One such feature that Thesis has that Catalyst doesn’t is the integrated multimedia box. This multimedia box makes it super simple to embed video and rotate pictures. A multimedia box is useful for any website, embedding video will increase the retention of readers on your website. Attention span is in short supply on the internet, so this is a praiseworthy thing.

Child Theme Support

A feature that both Thesis and Catalyst share is the ability to make child themes quickly and easily. There will be more information on child themes in a moment, but you can think of them as style sheets for your template. Basically, it allows you to upgrade your premium theme without touching your custom modifications. If you want to copy some old modifications you made to a previous website you made, it’s as effortless as copying the files over. This is why web developers love both of the frameworks.

Loading times for Self Hosted Websites

Clean and fast code are another thing to consider when choosing a theme to use for your website. Luckily both Catalyst and Thesis have the same design goals to make loading times as fast as possible with the use of HTML5 and CSS3 validated code. This means no matter which option you choose you are guaranteed to have a fast website that has zero validation errors.

Framework, Parent and Child Themes

What exactly is the difference between a framework and a child theme? The differences are quite numerous; however, the basic idea is that the framework exists for many different purposes. It can power an elegant template, or give features to the child and parent theme. The parent theme is one below the framework. Parent themes setup everything that wordpress requires of a theme but only has the barebone essentials for the theme. Users who want to take the theme a step further and customize it to their liking should use child themes to do this. A child theme is a set of files that overwrite parent theme functions, or add to them, without disturbing the files of the parent theme. This means that if the parent, or framework, get updated you can download these updates without redoing your changes since they are separate files. So to sum it up, frameworks are for functionality; parent themes are for basic designs, and child themes are for website owners special touches.

One Click Child Theme

If you are ready to start making your own child themes in order to take advantage of these features, the easiest way is with a plugin. This plugin is called One-Click Child Theme and it does just that. With a single click, you can generate a child theme with a single click. This child theme will allow you to modify until your heart is content. If an update to your theme comes out, all of your changes to the child theme will not be removed.

Premium Themes for WordPress require FTP Clients

Before you are ready to take advantage of the power that premium WordPress themes can offer, you need to learn how to install the themes. Luckily installing a WordPress theme isn’t all that hard, as long as you know the basics of an FTP client. First, however, you need to download the theme. Once the theme is on your local hard drive you need to unzip it, you should be left with a single folder. Once that is done, and you can drudge your way through the FTP client you need to point it towards your website and at the ‘wp-content/themes’ directory. There you simply drag and drop the folder containing your theme into the ‘themes’ folder on your FTP client. Now log into your WordPress back end and click ‘Appearance’ then ‘Themes’. Your new theme should be listed, and all you have to do is click ‘Activate ‘.

Hosting your own WordPress Site Advice

Please feel free to contact @JulianaPayson directly on Twitter for any guest posts on your site relevant to Web Hosting your own WordPress Website. Juliana is a SEO Specialist for InMotion Hosting, a company based in LA providing webhosting with 24/7 US based tech support.