The Brightness WordPress theme is nothing short of stunning; it’s half magazine, half blog and is reminiscent of some of the best professional, modern blog designs around.

For a free theme, Brightness comes with a great deal of features, including a well-designed featured post area, post thumbnails, built-in advertising and news sections.

The theme also offers a complete settings page, allowing the user to simply manage all of these premium-grade features without having to worry about editing code.

Demo and download:

Demo
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Dark yet colourful, the Firebug WordPress theme has two widget-ready sidebars, space allocated for ads and social tagging options built into the posts.

It’s also Gravatar ready, works with WordPress’s built-in Gallery feature and offers Photoshop file for replacing the logo in the banner.

Firebug has a stylish, modern layout. The background can make the (small) text a little hard to read, so a flat colour without the texture may be a better option.

Demo and download:

Demo
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Newspress is a stylish and modern premium Wordpress theme which includes beautifully displayed feature content sections, a built-in video player and integrated ads.

The theme also offers an options screen for changing the default white, grey and orange colour scheme, and for switching the homepage layout.

The video player allows the publisher to publish their videos easily and seamlessly on the homepage.

Other features include dropdown navigation menus, a tabbed display box, automatic image resizer, custom page templates for archives, sitemap and an image gallery, as well as support for gravatars.

Cost

The Newspress theme costs $US70 for a single licence or $US150 for a developer’s licence. Alternatively, join the WooThemes club for $150 per quarter.

Demo and download:

Demo
Purchase

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Orange. Contemporary. Easy to read. Those are the key factors that make Keesheep worthy of a place on bestwpthemes.com.

This two-column theme features a large header area, prominent search bar and a right-hand sidebar. It’s well worth a look.

Don’t be frightened off because the demo version isn’t in English. The downlaod link below goes to an English version of the theme.

More info and download:

Demo
Full details and download

A fabulous magazine-style layout, Overstand is free from clutter and highlights content beautifully using a combination of white space, large slugs, neat headlines and thumbnail images.

Orange and grey are the predominant colours and the layout ranges across three columns.

The theme takes a little bit of extra work in set-up but the results can be worthwhile.

Demo and download:

Demo
Full details and download

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.

Demo and download:

Demo
Download