More than one way to find a Ghost theme

This text is an attempt to capture changes that, over time, became important both for me — as I organize what I show on the site and how I describe individual themes — and for people who come here looking for a theme or some inspiration, since they don’t always know right away what they actually need for their publication.

For a long time, the site followed a simple model — a single catalog, with the choice left entirely to the user. Categories and theme groupings were only loose conventions and had little real effect on the site’s structure. Now the site has grown considerably because of the move to direct sales, which in turn means that everything someone might need should be available right here.

At this point, more factors came into play than I’d previously given much weight to. One is presenting information in a way that actually helps people find what they need. Another is giving that information enough structure to be found and understood beyond the site itself.

I ended up expanding categories into full-fledged sections, where I can assign a theme and add a few sentences explaining why it belongs there. That’s a first step toward defining which kinds of publications a given theme is positioned for. From experience, though, I know these boundaries are extremely loose. The Showcase makes that particularly clear, as my own assumptions about a theme are often overturned in surprising ways. A site still needs some kind of framework, though, and categories at least give people something to orient themselves by within the collection. It’s the most direct path for people who simply enjoy browsing the catalog and filtering what they need that way.

Google’s AI Overviews were one sign that this structure mattered. Seeing simple mistakes in search results, including theme names being mixed up with their creators, made me want to publish clearer, better-structured information at the source. The same knowledge base then became the foundation of my own Advisor, giving people with specific questions a quicker path than working through every theme page.

Something was still missing, though — something between these two approaches that would naturally extend both. There’s also a group of people who’d rather answer than ask. What I needed was something between plain browsing and structured knowledge, still able to produce a quick result in the form of theme suggestions matching specific requirements. That’s how the Finder came about — it generates the most relevant results from a handful of questions, based on the user’s own choices. The result is a narrowed-down list of themes that can then be checked more closely against actual needs.

These routes make choosing more deliberate, but none should be treated as definitive. A demo or product description can only show a handful of possible uses, while categories and recommendations inevitably simplify what each theme can become.

All the themes are designed for Ghost, so they naturally share many of the same patterns and solutions. Yet a detail that seems minor — sometimes a single section — can shift where a theme belongs. The opposite is also true: adding too much can turn a focused product into one that has no clear point.

Building these tools has also changed how I think about future themes. Categories give the collection a useful framework, but they should describe possibilities rather than set boundaries. The challenge is to make each theme clear enough to place while leaving room for people to use it in ways I did not anticipate.