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Hunting Wordpress Themes

By Nick Hodge | April 13, 2008

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/