Cutline, originally created by Chris Pearson, is an easily customisable, black and white Wordpress theme with a large header image and navigation bar. Pearson and his successors as custodians of Cutline (he sold it) have provided a lot of tips for tinkering with the theme.

The theme is also optimised for search engines, has classes written for smooth handling of images, and allows for random rotation of header images.

Pros:

• Simple, stylish design
• Quality typography
• Easy to customise
• Good online tutorials for tweaking the theme
• Optimised for search engines

Cons:

• Perhaps a little too popular for its own good. You certainly won’t be alone using Cutline.

Demo and download:

Demo
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Elite is a truly beautiful, very readable Wordpress theme thanks to its unique colouring and wonderful typography.

It has white text on a dark grey background with bright green and blue links; the layout is clean and sleek with a sidebar on the left and no images in the design.

Pros:

• Simple, clean design
• Lovely typography
• Beautiful colours

Cons:

• The blog title doesn’t appear anywhere by default, though you could easily add it at the top of the sidebar.
• Some users have complained that the theme ’shifts’ in their browser, with the main column pushed below the left-hand sidebar.
• The search code apparently needs a slight tweak.

Demo and download:

Demo
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Geezeo isn’t perfect out of the box but with a little bit of tweaking it can transform into one of the sexiest Wordpress themes around.

For instance, by default the theme doesn’t display post headlines. While this can actually work to your advantage (for instance if you just want to post a links-style blog), for most users it’s probably not the best option. However, a little bit of fiddling around in the code and the stylesheet will give you your clever headlines back.

Pros:

• Simple, clean design
• Lovely typography

Cons:

• May be too plain vanilla for some

Demo and download:

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Tranquility White is a minimalist white-and-green theme with a neat Flash animation in its header.

It’s very plain and also easy to customise.

For a darker take on the same theme, try Tranquility.

Pros:

• Minimalist layout, with emphasis on the content
• Well set out code makes customisation a breeze
• Widget support

Cons:

• May be too plain vanilla for some

Demo and download:

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Beautiful Day 2.0 is simple but indeed beautiful. With soft yet bright colours and a classy horizontal page navigation bar, it’s an attractive two-column theme following a standard blog style.

Pros:

• Attractive theme
• Simple blog-style layout
• Useful for personal or more professional blogs
• Adaptable

Cons:

• Nothing of note.

Demo and download:

Demo
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If you can’t decide exactly how you want your site to look, let your users decide. Skittlish allows site visitors to choose between fixed and fluid width, and between seven candy-inspired colours for the sidebar.

Pros:

• Valid code
• Widget support
• Support for popular plugins

Cons:

• Nothing of note, unless you’re not keen on handing over control of your site’s appearance to your users.

More info and download:

Full details and download (Click “next” below the download panel at the bottom of the page until the theme appears, then download.)

K2 is more of an advanced framework rather than just a Wordpress theme. It also has to qualify as having by far the longest development timeframe of any Wordpress theme.

Originally the brainchild of Kubrick developer Michael Heilemann, K2 is now something much bigger: a project with a number of contributors and a significant infrastructure behind it.

Out of the box, K2 is a simple and stylish two-column theme with a blue header. For more advanced users, it opens up a whole world of hacking that allows K2 to look like almost anything you want it to.

Pros:

• Prepackaged support for some of the most widely used plugins
• Simple styling with alternative style sheet
• Live commenting
• Live search
• Rolling archives
• Sidebar modules - Widgets on steroids

Cons:

• There aren’t too many, really, although personally I’d like to see more white space between the columns and a slightly slimmer main text column.

Demo and download:

Demo
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A clean, two-column theme that comes in shades of green by default. The colours aren’t my favourite but happily they’re easy to change. You don’t even need to alter any images; simply edit the colours in the CSS via the Wordpress interface.

This is a full-width theme with a large banner image and Widget support.

Pros:

• Widget support
• Easy to change color scheme
• Collapsible layout
• Choice of banner images - or use your own
• Drop-down menus
• Accessible code

Cons:

• The default colours aren’t real pretty (but they’re easy to change)
• The text size is quite small and the line length long, limiting readability

Demo and download:

Demo
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