Margot is a simple but effective blog theme, with two columns, a simple navigation bar across the top, clean and crisp typography, rounded corners and a large header image.

It would be easy to change the header and the colours to make a unique site design if you have some limited Wordpress templating and CSS skills.

Features:

• Minimal, clean design
• Content is the focus, and entries are easy to read
• Easy to customise if you’re looking for that ability
• Similar to the default Wordpress theme, Kubrick, without being too similar

Demo and download:

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Brian Gardner, the Dropshadow theme’s author, describes it as having a “modern, yet elegant look”, which is pretty much right on the money.

Dropshadow is a two-column, Widget-ready theme, with a dark-grey header and navigation, a mix of serif and san-serif typography, and easy to read black-on-white text in the main content column.

Features:

• Clean, elegant design
• Easy to read typography
• Dark-grey header with built-in navigation
• Two-column design, with extra navigation on the left

Demo and download:

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Simplicity is a clean, minimal, two-column Wordpress theme. The name says it all – this is an elegant theme that lets the content stand for itself.

It comes in two different shades. The SimplicityDark has a dark grey background with light text. SimplicityBright has a lighter background. The Simplicity theme is only available in German (though it’s simple to translate it across to English) but SimplicityBright has an English language version.

You’re currently looking at a modified version of the Simplicity Light theme in use on www.bestwpthemes.com.

Features:

• Simple, stylish design
• Easy to read typography
• This is an easy template to modify for your own purposes

Download:

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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:

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UPDATE: This theme appears to no longer be available.

The Hello 2007 Wordpress theme is grey, white and blue all over and screams Web 2.0.

Don’t be frightened off by the Japanese (I think it’s Japanese) on the theme’s homepage. The theme itself is ready to use in English, though some hand tweaking of the header and footer is necessary.

Pros:

• Clean lines, very legible text
• Puts the focus on the content of your posts

Cons:

• You’ll need to jump into the code in order to add your own header image and to tweak the navigation bar. Also, the footer includes old coding to add tags, so you’ll need to jump in there and clean that up. Nothing too complicated though.

Demo and download:

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