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
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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:
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4. Arras
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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:
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
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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
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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. |
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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!
