My Wheels Demo

My Wheels

My Wheels is an iPhone application designed to help when buying a car. It offers step by step information from basic car inspection to taking a test drive and assessing encumbrances.

Your first car can be a daunting task, and even if you have bought a car before its easy to forget to pick up log books and perform relevant registry checks more...

My Wheels on App Store

Choosing the best free wordpress theme

When setting up your website or blog, a quick way to get things up and running with a lot of flexibility is to use wordpress, which is a very well supported framework for creating websites and publishing content. It is written in PHP so almost all hosting providers should support it.

Sound good so far? the complication starts when you want to customise the look and feel of your wordpress website, which you will most likely want to do both in terms of look & feel and features. Fortunately there are both premium and free themes available to customise your website.

Here is my top 5 list of the free wordpress themes I have assessed and the issues faced with each theme:

5. PlatForm

Platform WordPress Theme A clean and elegant worpress theme, a great theme to start with. If you are after a clean blog with more focus on written content than visuals then this is probably ideal.

My Concerns were:

  • no feature section
  • moderate customisation capability, without resorting to css
  • basic look and feel

 

4. Arras

Arras WordPress Theme In terms of look and feel, I felt that this theme was almost perfect. It also has a built in feature slider for recent posts. It is elegant, however when attempting to deploy I hit the following issue:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘=’, expecting ‘)’ in …/wp-content/themes/arras/library/admin/options.php on line 216

After a quick search, I realised this was most likely caused by an older version of PHP, explained here. I was not patient enough to wait for my hosting provider to upgrade their PHP, or actually change the code, and potentially have to do that on every upgrade of this theme, so shelved it. However I suggest trying this theme, it may work for you.

3.  Nublu

Nublu WordPress Theme A decent theme, with cool twitter integration. I was very tempted to use this theme, however just didn’t feel if was quite right for my subject matter.

Geared towards a social networking site, and fairly ready to go. Also has a feature area, where latest posts can be previewed, automatically generating thumbnail images from the post image.

2. Sliding Door

Sliding Door WordPress Theme Very nice theme, with an awesome sliding door effect for a header. A dark theme, with 3 columns, which I think is suited more to picture based content.

Try this theme and decide if it is right for you, if you are comfortable working a little with CSS then you should be able to get a great result with little tweaks.

1. Flexibility 3

Flexibility 3 WordPress Theme Highly customisable, and comes with a lot of pre-configured  skins. The great thing about this theme is that it has all the structural elements I need, a features area, 2 column, header, menu, footer, and can be tweaked using a thorough set of options.

The first thing I liked is that there is a setting to configure the color scheme for the site, and the theme will automatically generate variations of gradients for the header / menu / footer.

This is a mature theme, and you can upgrade to get rid of the small ad at the bottom. The FREE version is full featured, except for the ad.

You will need to edit some HTML to setup your features area, but most of the rest can be tweaked using settings.

Remember that one the coolest things about wordpress is that you can change the theme at any time, the content is stored in a database and will automatically be rendered based on the theme in most cases.

Good luck with your website / blog!

 

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog!

I hope you find some useful information here, I have been in the software industry for almost a decade, and have worked on various platforms. Currently focused on mobile technologies, but professionally work with .NET and various design methodologies as a Solutions Architect.