Cool, beautiful Wordpress themes
Gotham Nights boasts a multi-coloured header/background image and a two-column layout with lovely typography and oodles of white space.
It has a nice tabbed section in the right-hand sidebar allowing site authors to organise and display lots of content.
It would also be very simple to change the background to create a more minimalist but still elegant and effective look.
WP Bats is a two-column theme largely inspired by the design of the New York Times’ blogs.
As you can imagine that gives it quite a newspapery look and feel. The main column is on the left, with a widget-compatible sidebar on the right.
Nice touches include a print style sheet, tags, horizontal navigation across the very top of the page and an archives template. The theme is also valid in terms of its XHTML and CSS coding.
Professor isn’t designed specifically as a photo blog but this brown-tinged, two-column Wordpress theme displays images with such effect that that’s probably what it’s best used for.
The theme author says Professor was designed to focus on the written word, but large images inserted into posts in this theme would get more attention than the headlines, which are offset in the right-hand column, making it perhaps better suited to photo blogging than anything else.
Either way, it’s a stylish and modern theme with a number of nice touches, including featured posts, a widget-enabled footer and valid code.
Oh My Grid is a grid-based, two-column Wordpress theme with a large header and a simple but contemporary and stylish layout.
It incorporates Wordpress’ tagging system and offers easy header image replacement through the theme options page.
The theme options also provide additional fields for quick and easy customisation, and it’s widget ready.
Revolution Blog is a stylish, free theme with the option to choose between three different traditional blog-style layouts.
Whether you choose the two-column version with a right sidebar, the three-column version with left and right sidebars, or the three column version with two right sidebars, you’ll get a clean and elegant, widget-ready blog with a blue and white colour scheme.
All feature crystal-clear typography, a stylish header and a lovely, functional horizontal navigation bar.
Revolution Blog is a free theme from the creator of the premium Revolution series of themes.
Demo (Choose which version you’d like to view.)
Full details and download
Thunderbolt is a savvy, grid-aligned, magazine-style Wordpress theme with plenty of white space, impressive typography and sensible use of images.
The theme has a beautiful custom archives page, showcasing the images attached to each post (to appear properly, the theme relies on the author to add images to each post).
The front page is reminiscent of a magazine cover.
The theme author recommends Thunderbolt for moderate to advanced WordPress users, who can use the supplied readme to help them customise and and use the theme.
The theme is free but for $US10 you can buy a version without any links back to the theme author.
Demo (Choose Thunderbolt in the dropdown box.)
Full details and download
Nishita is a simple yet beautiful photo blogging theme for Wordpress, with a white and grey colour scheme.
There are no distractions here. All the focus is on your photos or images.
It’s easy to upload images and the navigation is nicely handled.
Corporate Sandbox is a clean, minimalist theme, which as the name suggests is ideal for corporate blogs. Then again, it’s perfectly suited to a personal blog so long as you’re happy with a white, light look.
It’s a white, two-column theme with simple horizontal navigation at the top, a large header area and a right-hand sidebar. It’s widget ready and very easy to customise; you can change CSS colours in just a couple of seconds.
This theme is also a great starting point for developing future Wordpress themes. It makes an easy canvas to work with for making a unique theme.
Crystal 1.0 is a very usable, dark, two-column Wordpress theme built off the back of the popular Hemingway style.
It’s widget-ready and features a neat horizontal navigation at the top, with a ‘crystal’ blue background. Changing the background on that nav bar (and preferably the background and link colours to match) would be a simple way to customise the theme to create your own unique style.
Press Box is a simple, striking theme for Wordpress that’s half blog, half magazine-style site. It’s a modern theme with a lot of options, and comes in both free and paid versions.
The free limited version is attractive and has plenty to offer. The premium version, which costs $US45, offers a few extras, such as a ‘portfolio’ view and extra page templates.
The premium version also removes the links back to the theme’s creators.
This is a unique theme. Here’s how the creators describe it:
“We consider this a ‘premium theme’, but it isn’t a magazine. It looks like a blog and (if it could) would walk and talk like one too. It does look a little different then a normal blog, and has a few more options, but it doesn’t forget about its past growing up in the blogosphere.”
Press Box has plenty of personality and plenty of extra options to play with.
TV Elements: Sharp and dark, this is a perfect video showcase.
