[theme-reviewers] New Theme Name Suggestions

[Ian Stewart]

On Jul 23, 2014, at 6:43 AM, Steve Kamn <stevekamn at gmail.com> wrote:

> Let consider another best example of Automattic Profile where i have failed to find a single theme name which was taken by considering the SEO grounds in mind, but all of there themes are full of quality and user experience. Another noticeable thing in there names is UNIQUENESS or in my words BRAND.

Here are some old notes of mine from WordPress.com Theme Team discussions on theme-naming that may be helpful …

Car manufacturers and Apple are great at naming things. I don’t think many people care that an Impala is a medium-sized African antelope. It sounds great. (My dad drives an Impala.) I think it’s pretty obvious that Panther and Mavericks are amazing names too. Impala, Mavericks, they’re great almost unassuming but very evocative names. Those are names to shoot for.

Whatever we call it I think the best criteria for theme names is “is it an evocative name for the theme”.

So, the name could be fun, meaningful, punny, etc. but overall it should be a name that attempts to intentionally evoke qualities we think are important for that theme and it’s audience.

When trying to think up something for the Forefront theme my goal was a name that business owners would be less likely to be embarrassed about seeing in their footers. Don't embarrass your users. :) So, Excelsior theme would be better than Haxxorrocker21 theme in that case. When looking for names for Forefront I found a list of Steve Jobs quotes. My thought process: Steve Jobs was a businessman! I know who he is! People like him!— and started browsing words he’d used in those quotes at Thesaurus.com for similar words that sounded cool. I found "forefront" on the page for “advance”. Thesaurus.com is really cool because each word has it’s own permalink and you can just hit cmd-l and use your keyboard to quickly search via the address bar.

Bonus: The Best Words http://www.vocabula.com/vrbestwords.asp

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Ian