5 Professional-looking Free Wordpress Themes
Great content can lose momentum if it’s wrapped in a brown paper bag. Your site design impacts content layout, advertising space and most importantly, it influences how your readers perceive what you have to offer.
There are no shortage of bad looking Wordpress themes. Many times I will pass by a site without really scratching the surface because my initial impression is that it is just another generic, poorly designed Wordpress blog.
Here are 5 Professional-looking Free Wordpress Themes that I feel stand out from the crowd. These free themes will have your site looking like you paid someone to design it. It’ll be our secret that they didn’t cost you a thing.
The Digg 3 Columns theme is very nicely done. Rounded window corners, tabbed top level navigation and a clean layout. Could use a footer box to match the header and content body, but this is a nice theme nonetheless. In fact, this is one of the nicest Wordpress themes I’ve seen.
The Black Fresh theme is clean like the crisp, white shirt of Wordpress Themes. Stark and clinical, the Black Fresh theme offers a fairly two dimensional presentation. It sports a large footer section for navigation, advertising and widget options. The default blockquote font color is too pale, but such things are easily fixed.
This is another theme that is really a cut above as far as Wordpress theme design goes. Rounded window corners, great stylesheet with a color scheme that is professional and easy on the eye, but not one bit boring.
4. gHacks Theme
The gHacks theme has a nice, high contrast color scheme that makes things stand out without causing eye strain. The comments bar is attractive and does a good job letting the reader know they’re leaving the article they just browsed, but it’s a lot of real estate for just a comment balloon. It would be a good place to list the category, or better yet, related articles to give interested readers somewhere to go.
Very sharp, very professional looking theme. Will help give the impression that a team of designers, writers and editors are involved in producing your site.
Feel free to comment with any themes you think should be on this list. In a sea of bad designs and clones of the successful ones, good design stands out.
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Comment by mlankton on 14 January 2008:
…and in defense of Joomla, while Wordpress is more lightweight, most Wordpress sites take longer to load than my Joomla site with a big mootools slideshow on the front page because of all the stuff people put in their sidebars that has to load from remote locations. In either case we’re talking about 3-5 seconds.
Remember when we used to sit and watch web pages load, or wait for an email to download? It’s nice that we can provide a rich user experience that is more than just text and still only make the user wait a few moments.
Comment by mlankton on 14 January 2008:
We’ll see if 1.5’s imminent release improves on that.