www.nickhodge.com

Time to change themes on this site.

I have a simple request: White-space is king, single left hand nav­ig­a­tion with fluid right-hand con­tent column. Tweak­ing the typo­graphy to look bril­liant is more import­ant than whizzy graph­ics detract­ing the eye.

As @evilsue says on twit­ter: “have reskinned blog.….again.…its the poor girls sub­sti­tute for buy­ing shoes”

So, with these demands in mind — my first port of call was to put a call out to the Twit­ter­ati. Here is my list of sites, in no par­tic­u­lar order.

Let’s start the ThemeHunting:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes/Theme_List

What is a theme, and how do you cre­ate one?

At the bot­tom of the page, there is a list of Theme sites.

Very soon you head into nasty MySpace-themed sites with mega-advertisements ugliness.

http://themes.wordpress.net/

This is the uber-viewer of themes, hos­ted by Word­Press. There is a stand­ard set of con­tent you can apply to vari­ous themes.

For instance, for my next theme I would like left side­bar, 2 column, white, no header image and widget-ready.

Either the way the themes are clas­si­fied in ThemeViewer, or the viewer itself seems borked as you get a mix­ture of everything when you search.

The themes here seem to be rather plain, but it is the place to start your search.

http://www.elegantwpthemes.com/

Eleg­ant themes seem to involve lots of shad­ing, blue and images.

No magical search­ing to make life easier to find that theme.

http://www.revolutiontheme.com/

This is an uber-theme that alters the concept of Word­Press as a blog into Word­Press as a CMS.

http://www.topwpthemes.com/

Advert­ise­ments stat­ing “earn $3506 per month from blog­ging” seem to har­angue you on this site; again many pre-built images in the header.

Mega-click through blog with no smart search­ing. fail.

http://www.templateworld.com/free_templates.html

Inter­est­ing list of tem­plates, but seems to be frozen in 2007

http://www.noupe.com/design/60-unusual-wp-blog-designs.html

Now, if I was going super-trendy with lots of graph­ics and col­our — this is the site I would choose first.

There is an excel­lent list of no-frills themes too in the 45+ Must-see Themes. And I think I’ve found my first contender:

http://www.briangardner.com/themes/blue-zinfandel-wordpress-theme.htm (although in review it lacks right-fluidity)

It is also inter­est­ing to see the themes borked by com­ment form ugliness

http://www.wpthemereview.com/

Des Walsh, of Think­ing Home Busi­ness, pos­ted this link.

Here, each of the Word­Press themes earns an SEO score: how well the par­tic­u­lar theme works with search-engine optim­isa­tion. In my instance, I have some WP plu­gins doing some magic behind the scenes to ensure the search­bots get it right.

From this site, I found my second contender:

http://www.theblogstudio.com/index.php/v5/resources (Branches theme, I would howerver change the top-left image)

http://del.icio.us/popular/wordpress

Of course! fol­low the tags, son.

First to pop up in the list is http://www.wpzoom.com/

Smash­ing Magazine has an excel­lent list of plain well designed themes: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/25/15-more-free-first-class-wordpress-themes/

I like Bal­ance­White and Text­Back

Meta-theme Gen­er­ator: http://www.yvoschaap.com/wpthemegen/

This is fun: Word­Press theme by form. I recall try­ing this about a year ago, with epic fail. Now seems to be rather cool.

Rock­ing Themes: http://rockinthemes.com/

The current/to be replaced theme here is Ambi­ent Glo Fluid 1.5. Look­ing around on that site, I notice that there are some excel­lent min­im­al­ist designs such as http://rockinthemes.com/rockinminimalist-2-column-free-wordpress-theme/

Con­clu­sions?

Word­Press Themes are like shoes. You can shop until you drop, install them all and wear dif­fer­ent col­ours on dif­fer­ent days.

Oh, the choices!