Cool, beautiful Wordpress themes
The KISS Styled (keep it simple, stupid) theme for Wordpress is very, very clean and very, very simple.
The theme has a nicely styled image-free header and two columns and is widget friendly.
KISS Styled would also be a perfect design to start with if you’re looking to mould a theme into a unique design.
The Dark Hut Wordpress theme is elegant, stylish and easy to read theme, with the focus immediately placed on the content of the site.
The theme has a dark feel befitting its name but has a white content area to keep the focus on the content and maintain legibility.
The large footer has four columns for displaying various information, and the theme is widget ready.
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.
The Tao of You Wordpress theme is an attractive single-column theme with large headlines and a big, fat two-column footer.
The theme also features a large, centre-aligned text header and navigation bar, support for inline asides and a clean look with stylish typography.
The right-hand section of the footer is ready and able for some sweet widget action.
Hunsecker is a Wordpress theme with light text on a dark background; it has lovely typography, a nice sense of space and a unique three-column layout.
The theme has a nice, simple header with navigation bar. This stays in place when you scroll down. I’m not a big fan of the effect but it’s nicely implemented in this case.
The left-hand column contains metadata about each post, the central column has the main content and the right-hand column contains whatever you want really.
A simple but stylish header and immaculately styled typography distinguish Danvers from the standard crop of two-column Wordpress themes.
The theme features a wide main content column with large, centred post headlines, large tracts of pristine white space and a neat right-hand sidebar for navigation and other content. It has nice styles built in for images, as well as other elements such as lists and blockquotes.
Clean and minimalist, but with a great deal of attention to detail, Danvers is one Wordpress theme that will put your content in front of readers’ eyeballs.
Clean and minimalist are two words that come to mind when viewing the Author’s Grid Wordpress theme. Stylish and professional are two more.
This two-column theme, as the name suggests, is set out according to a grid and puts the author’s words front and centre with few distractions.
The theme has seven spots where you can add widgets (three in the sidebar and four in the extended footer), as well as a large 300 × 250 at the top of the sidebar by default.
The styling for various elements of the theme has a very professional appearance. Worth checking out if you want your content to be king.
Demo (Select Author’s Grid in dropdown box)
Full details and download
WPCandy is a sweet, stylish, two-column Wordpress theme with a hint of the Web 2.0 about it, created by the site of the same name.
It has a simple header with a horizontal navigation bar across the top of the site, main content in the left column and a right-hand sidebar for extra navigation and widgets.
I’m not a big fan of the scrollovers in the navigation bar but they’re probably impressive to some people (alternatively, they should be pretty simple to remove).
The sidebar is Widget ready, the CSS and XHMTL are valid if that matters to you, and there are Archives and Links page templates included with the theme.
Thesis: Super SEO, easy customisation, beautiful type. Thesis has it all.
