I recently stumbled across freewpthemes.net which has a nice collection of Wordpress themes. They’re all available completely free under the Creative Commons License.
Here are my favourite 5 themes from the site.
Balloon
A clean looking theme with plenty of white space.
Preview Download
inBloom
Interesting selection of colours which I think works well.
Preview Download
Mr techie
Nice Web 2.0 look and feel to this one. I like how the design has been laid out. There is also room for ads in the sidebar.
Preview Download
newave
If you want a minimalist and clutter free home page for your blog then this one will appeal to you. The entire home page is visible without any scrolling. I like how the latest article is shown in full with previous articles shown as excerpts to the right.
There is no sidebar but I like that. No sidebar could work well on some sites, such as those which publish lengthy articles. Removing the sidebar means wider articles and less scrolling for the reader. Nice Web 2.0 rounded edges and shadows with this theme.
Preview Download
unmoving
Interesting use of headers with this theme which works well.
Preview Download
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7 responses so far ↓
1 Swiss_Mouse // Sep 13, 2007 at 3:14 am
Personally, I really like the designs by miloIIIIVII. Some are available at wordpress via:
http://themes.wordpress.net/author/milo317/
2 Dean // Sep 13, 2007 at 6:49 am
Thanks for the link. There are some nice themes there too. The BigBlue, ClearCut and Sly 3.0 themes looked good.
3 Swiss_Mouse // Sep 13, 2007 at 10:35 pm
The Swiss_Mouse likes the ones above as well, though less “slick” than on the link provided.
One issue the Swiss_Mouse has found as a new blogger is that picking a nice theme really is an important decision. The Swiss_Mouse also found with his theme that he had trouble with certain plug-ins. Brian’s threaded comments for example (but only in Firefox). But by that time so much time was invested in getting the Cheddarblog up and running and customizing some pages within the theme, that ….it wasn’t worth switching to a “working” theme.
Like eating spoiled cheese.
4 Dean // Sep 14, 2007 at 7:13 am
Picking a good theme is important. Equally important for a new blogger is writing good quality content on a regular basis.
I’ve often spent hours tweaking the theme and layout of this blog. Time which sometimes I feel could have been better spent writing articles.
My advice for anyone is to pick a good theme and then stick with it for a few months. Once a blog gets more established you can consider a makeover then.
If you’ve invested a lot of time tweaking a theme then it makes the switch to another theme more difficult, just as you say.
I agree, spoiled cheese is not tasty!
5 Gadgeteer // Sep 27, 2007 at 10:07 am
I more incline to a theme that’s search engine friendly. I do hope someone (who has the real seo expertise) will make a site that gives rating to wp themes, base on its search engine friendliness. thus make it easy for us, mere mortal, to choose a theme. Beauty is not just skin deep
6 Dean // Sep 27, 2007 at 4:45 pm
I totally agree gadgeteer. I see many themes which could be improved from an SEO perspective.
I’ll be writing about this in a future article.
7 mervandi // Oct 19, 2007 at 11:36 am
Nice themes. Probably will try one of them later.
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