Best Wordpress Themes

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Best WP Themes is now even better

Since Best WP Themes launched in 2007, it’s sported a slightly modified free WordPress theme. The presentation was lean, clean and, well, a little mean.

From today, the site features a purpose-built design, created by the incomparable Sam Brown from Massive Blue.

The goal of the new design was to maintain a minimalist aesthetic, while creating a more professional look and feel, and making it easier and more pleasurable to explore the featured themes.

Apart from the more professional look and feel across the site, improvements added alongside the new design include:

Clear promotion of new featured items at the top of the front page. This is a place to showcase the “best of” collections Best WP Themes has put together. We’re looking to add more of these from now on.
Clearer navigation, allowing easier access to the best WordPress themes on the planet.
New premium theme categories make it much easier to find particular types of paid themes, such as photo galleries, blog themes and magazine themes.
Improved tag pages, providing a much more useful way to browse the Best WP Themes archives.
New Top 10 lists for free and premium themes. This may be a controversial addition, but I’m going out on a limb and choosing what I think are the top 10 WordPress themes in circulation for both free and paid themes. The selections are based on my personal taste, and to some degree on what themes prove popular with Best WP Themes visitors.

You may have noticed that new additions to our collection of themes have been few and far between recently. Now the new design is up and running, this should change dramatically.

Your feedback is welcome. Feel free to let us know about any glitches in the new design. Sam and I will be trying to stamp these out in the next few days.

August 5th, 2009 | Features | 3 Comment

The Best WordPress Themes of 2008

2008 has been a massive year in the world of WordPress themes, with the emergence of a number of professional design houses selling premium themes, accompanied by a steady stream of quality free theme releases.

The year has seen fevered discussion surrounding the issue of premium themes and how they interact with the GPL licence associated with WordPress.

However, for most users of WordPress the biggest developments have been the improvements to the software’s interface and the release of richer, increasingly professional designs from both free and premium developers.

There’s been a great deal of innovation during the year, much of it coming from the premium space and leaking into free themes over time. For instance, many themes now come with custom administration panels that allow users to customise their theme from within the WordPress menus. Such a facility was basically unheard of at the start of 2008.

Here’s bestwpthemes.com’s selection of the best themes of 2008. There are 45 themes in all, divided between free and premium themes.

The best free WordPress themes of 2008

Typebased

Andrea

Charade

Revolution White Canvas

Revolution Album

Elegant Grunge

Carrington

Sirup

Equilibrium

Blass2

Upstart Blogger Swiss

Vostok

The Morning After

Brightness

Thematic

Monotone

MNML

Ocular Professor

Lightning

Portfolio

Prologue

Thunderbolt

The Unstandard

Olegario

Fontella

Overstand

Depo Skinny

Grid Focus

The best premium WordPress themes of 2008

Sharp

Thesis

Fresh News

Perfection

Mimbo Pro

Perfection Grunge

Vintage

Folio

Our Community

YourFolio

Credit Crunch

Over Easy

Papercut

VibrantCMS

ProudFolio

Travailler

Modularity

Note: There’s a chance not all of the above themes were released in 2008. Some may have been available in late 2007 but only come to my notice in 2008. Nonetheless, I believe they belong among a list of the best themes of 2008, as this is when they came to prominence.

Check out our full list of the best of the best WordPress themes.

December 23rd, 2008 | Features | 21 Comment

20 Best WordPress Themes For Small Business

Small business websites need to clearly reveal what the business is, what it does, who it serves, and where it’s located. They demand clear navigation and a functional layout.

While the best option is probably to hire a designer to create your site for you, that’s not always a practical (or affordable) option.

One extremely inexpensive or free alternative is to download WordPress, choose a theme and customise it with your own logo and content. If you or someone on your staff has a knack for computers and the web, this can be a viable option.

It can also produce very professional-looking results for little or no cash injection. In fact, with the right theme and a deft touch with small customisations, it’s not difficult to create a better result than you’d get from paying for a website from a designer at the cheaper end of the spectrum.

But what are the best WordPress themes for small businesses? That’s the question we’re here to answer. Here are the top 20 themes for creating a small business website (some themes are free; others are ‘premium’, meaning they can be bought for a moderate fee.

Vibrant CMS

Offering a choice of 20 colour schemes, VibrantCMS is an elegant WordPress solution for small business owners wanting to build a modern, attractive website. ($US70)

Thesis

Thesis is an extremely flexible WordPress theme that can be adapted for purposes as widespread as a simple blog through to a full-fledged business site. ($US87)

Revolution Pro Business

A stylish, dark theme designed with small businesses in mind, allowing for a professional-looking static homepage plus a corporate blog. ($US79.95)

WP Remix

WP Remix is an advanced WordPress theme suite offering a range of page designs and colour schemes; it’s very well designed and turns WordPress into more of a complete content management system than just a blog publishing tool. Provides a great deal of flexibility for the small business. ($US75)

Notepad

Notepad is a minimalist, clear WordPress theme designed to host a small business or brochure-ware type website, particularly businesses focused around a single professional, although it could easily be adapted for larger companies; it comes in 13 colour combinations. (Free)

Market

The Market theme allows you to easily run your own WordPress-powered marketplace (i.e. online ecommerce store). It’s easy to set up and run, and comes with numerous configuration options. ($US55)

Ecommerce

Ecommerce is another theme that allows you to set up and manage your own WordPress-powered store online, and comes with a choice of six colour styles. ($US49)

WP CODA

WP CODA is a gorgeous, unique WordPress theme perfect for a product showcase site (especially for computer software). This theme’s fluid navigation is a great way to showcase various aspects of a product or various sides to the services provided by a business. (Free)

Travailler

Travailler is designed with the small business in mind, making it easy to create a smart-looking, custom-branded, professional website with great typography and design. ($US38)

Mimbo Pro

Mimbo Pro is designed to create online magazine websites, however with a little creative customisation it could be used to showcase a company’s products and services instead of magazine stories and images. ($US89.99)

WP-Polaroid

WP-Polaroid is a modern, funky WordPress theme designed to serve as a personal website, however it could just as easily be put to use as a small business homepage, with information about the company at the top of the homepage, and a weblog of the latest news items down below. Choose from blue and pink versions, or customise with your own background image. (Free)

Colourise

Colourise is a beautiful weblog-centric theme with a large header image. If the header image were replaced with a large image detailing key information about a company or its key product, the theme could serve as a good small business homepage. (Free)

Natural Power

Natural Power features rounded corners, a dark background and a crisp, clear design. The large coloured area towards the top of the page could be customised to highlight information about your business, followed by a weblog containing the latest company news and information. You can also choose from a number of colour schemes. (Free)

Whitespace

Whitespace is a professional-looking weblog theme. Businesses that are comfortable with having their latest news and information front and centre could use this theme, and add their “About Us” details at the top of one of the sidebars. (Free)

The Unstandard

The Unstandard is an image-heavy WordPress theme that could make a high impact small business website. The ‘weblog’ area in the main column could be used to visually promote various products, while providing company information in the right-hand text column. (Free)

Wynton Magazine

Wynton Magazine is another magazine-style WordPress theme that could just as easily be used as a small business website. The key is to publish items promoting your products and services instead of magazine stories. This theme makes good use of thumbnail images on the homepage. (Free)

PocketT

PocketT is a minimalist WordPress theme which could prove attractive to a small business that wants to communicate regularly with its clients. It features a prominent “about us” text area, clear navigation, and a weblog-style news feed. (Free)

WP Contact Manager

Rather than being a WordPress theme to help create a small business website, this is a theme that can help create a more productive workplace, by providing a common area to keep everybody’s business contacts up-to-date. You just install the theme, and then start posting your clients’ contact details to keep them in a central repository. (Free)

Prologue

This is another WordPress theme that can act as a great tool to help small businesspeople run their company. Small teams collaborating on a particular project could use Prologue to effectively communicate about who is doing what and when. (Free)

Launchpad

Launchpad is a fantastic theme for WordPress, which newly formed small businesses can use when they’re in the process of creating their website, or a new product website. It’s a domain parking theme that creates a homepage saying “Welcome to ‘X’ site” and asking visitors to sign up for RSS or email alerts so they know when the site proper launches. Much better than an “Under Construction” symbol. (Free)

Don’t miss our full list of the web’s best WordPress themes, including the cream of the premium theme crop.

August 10th, 2008 | Features | 44 Comment

10 Free WordPress Themes That Blow Many Premium Themes Away

There are now more than 100 premium WordPress themes on the market but the quality of those themes varies greatly. In fact, some ‘premium’ themes don’t really deserve that title; they’re only ‘premium’ themes in that you have to pay to use them. In some cases, you’d have to be mad to do so.

At the same time, amazing free themes keep coming onto the market. Some of those free themes are far and away more impressive than some of those being offered up as ‘premium’ themes.

Here are 10 free WordPress themes that will knock your socks off. They’ll also blow many so-called ‘premium’ themes out of the water.

Brightness

Half magazine and half blog, Brightness is one of the most impressive free theme launches of recent times. Its modern, sleek look is reminiscent of some of the best in professional blog design, sites such as Freelance Switch and PSD Tuts.

Lightning

Lightning reminds me a lot of sites like Smashing Magazine, although it’s much more stripped back in its out-of-the box format. Nonetheless, with the addition of a custom header image and a little tweaking of the styles, this could easily become a professional, eye-catching blog theme.

Charade

Sprinkled with beautiful icons, packing visual punch and offering up stylish typography, Charade is a free WordPress theme that impresses.

Thematic

Thematic mightn’t look all that special but under the hood, this theme offers a wider range of simple customisation than pretty much any premium theme on the market.

MassivePress

With a main content column featuring thumbnails for each post, a central navigation-type column and a right-hand sidebar visually showing off featured articles, MassivePress offers a great degree of flexibility.

The Morning After

There can be little doubt that the creator of The Morning After could charge people to download. It’s a clean, mean magazine-style WordPress machine.

Overstand

Free from clutter but with beautiful visual style, Overstand delivers a magazine-style homepage combining large slugs, neat headlines and thumbnail images.

Thunderbolt

Another clean and simple magazine style, Thunderbolt offers a beautiful, customizable WordPress solution for moderate to advanced users.

The Unstandard

As the name attests, this is not your average WordPress theme. It catches the user’s attention with headlines set over the top of large images on the homepage.

Neoclassical

A three-column classic offering a central column for main content, rotating header images and picture-perfect typography.

Natural Power

It mightn’t have the flexibility of some premium themes but for stylish, modern blogging, Natural Power has all the bases covered.

Don’t miss our full list of the web’s best WordPress themes, including the cream of the premium theme crop.

July 4th, 2008 | Features | 63 Comment

60 Best WordPress Themes For Freelancers

Freelancers need a homepage that’s professional, uncluttered and has a clear emphasis on providing key information about the freelancer, including their contact details.

Here are 60 WordPress themes that make creating such a site simple.