A website theme is the overall look of a website. An example is if you were creating a website for a gaming community you might use elements from specific games to make your website more creative and unique.

The benefits of creating a theme for your website is that it allows you to seperate your website from the competition and create a lasting impression on your users. A theme also helps to inspire creativity as you can style ordinary elements such as buttons or a sidebar with elements that are inspired from your theme.

There are so many websites on the internet, how are you going to make yourself unique?

As we have already discussed, creating a theme can help individualize your site from its competitors. Creating a theme that is relevant to your topic can make your site much more unique. Using textures, elements and images can improve your websites overall look.

Deciding On A Theme

What your website theme is going to be will depend on what type of website you are creating. For our purposes we will pretend we are making a web design site. One benefit of this genre is that there are a million directions that you can go.

When you have so many directions to go with there are two general choices you can make: Make a completely unique theme or make a theme that relates to your website name. If your website was called Pirate Designs you could make a theme using elements related to pirates.

Designing With Your Theme

Alright so lets pretend our web design site is called Pirate Designs, how are we going to design our website? First lets think of what comes to mind when we think of pirates. When I think of pirates I think ships, swords, cross bones, guns, gold and treasure.

We could use wood for the background, a treasure chest pieces to build a sidebar, cross bones for a logo. For colors its best to use colors that work well together, using different shades of brown from dark brown to a light tan would work well for a pirate inspired theme.

Other elements that you can style are things such as list bullets which could be gold bullion’s, input boxes could have a gold border etc.

You can see that once you decide on a theme and start designing it, it gets easier to think of creative ways to style your site. If your stuck on your theme search on a image site using the keywords related to your theme to get inspired.

Finding & Making Your Theme Elements

You can find some great free patterns and textures from these sites:

Squidfingers

DinPattern

Shizoo

For images you can check out:

Flickr

stock.xchng

I hope that you found this post interesting and useful.

We would love to compile a list of website that use unique and creative themes for their websites so if you have one leave us a link in the comments below and maybe your site will be featured.