A responsive theme is one which can adapt its layouts to different browser window widths and thus work on different devices such as phones, tablets, computers, and smart televisions: hopefully looking good on all of them.

With the prevalence of smart phones and tablets in business these days, any new corporate identity or product marketing website should really be using a responsive theme.

I recently moved the frontward-facing pages of this site over to WordPress in order to be able to benefit from the theme ecosystem that in theory would allow me to get a high-end designed look with a spend of only a few tens of dollars. Once I added the responsive requirement, however, and started actually testing the demo websites of the themes on mobile devices I found it was a harder job than I had expected to find one that had the overall look I wanted, had the right level of customisability combined with built-in features, and which wasn’t broken on some mobile browser or ugly at some window width. The rest of this post will summarise my findings and offer some pointers to good options.

If you head to google and start searching for WordPress themes, you will get lots of hits at companies that are using SEO (search engine optimisation) to compete for search engine traffic. Companies of this ilk such as Premium Press and WooThemes make that a very noisy environment to pick through. I did go directly to the theme vendors, including some good ones like Elegent Themes, but via the Startups for the rest of us Podcast, I learned about a better option which allows you to  search through a large number of themes and preview them quickly: Themeforest. that is where I found mine.