love Wordpress. Love it. Did I mention I LOVE Wordpress? The brilliance of Wordpress is how incredibly easy it is to get it up and running, how customizable it is with a modicum of programming knowledge, and now with a surplus of well-designed themes you can easily create a blog that looks great too. One of my favorite things to do is to start with a base template and modify according to my taste. I only do this for personal blogs of which I have many. I could probably feed a small country on what I spend per year on domain registration.

Anywho.

Today I added yet another domain to my collection and as I was looking for a great base template to start with it occurred to me to share some of the good ones I have found for those of you looking for inspiration or just a good base theme to start with.

Design Disease has some lovely colorful templates which can be used out of the box or customized. They also have premium paid templates, but the free ones are pretty solid. I particularly like this one.

Gigantic is a nice clean theme with decent type. This is the one I ended up going with. Download here

Irresistible – a lovely theme in my favorite color. Download here
WooThemes has other nice free themes here.

Color Paper — A well designed theme. Download theme

Design Pile for Smashing Magazine
Download

Magazeen Download Theme

Titan: a lovely, simple theme

If none of these themes is your style or you are looking for a specific style a great place to start is Smashing Magazine. The folks at Smashing have been kind enough to curate several galleries of themes. Here are a few to get you started:

• 100 Excellent Free Wordpress Themes
• 100 Free Wordpress Themes for 2009
• 83 WordPress Themes you probably haven’t seen
  

Here are a few guidelines for ensuring a successful Wordpress install:

• Always look at the demo of the theme, not just a screen capture.

  I often find that themes look very different in the live demos than they do in screen captures. A live demo will give you an idea of what the theme will look like when it is installed on your website and also help you to catch any cross browser display issues. Many themes are created by independent designers who originally designed them for their websites or who may have stopped supporting them, so it is good to check stability first.

• Read the designer’s notes

  Many designers post installation and other notes on their themes. Installation is usually standard, but these notes may help you customize, learn how to install supplemental plugins and fix small issues.

• Change the write permissions of your headers files on older versions of Wordpress

  I found this one out the hard way when my installation was hacked and my server shut off my website. Lock it down, baby.

• Make sure your new installation plays nice with your old installation

  If you have an old template in play with lots of content, it is a good idea to make sure things translate over smoothly. The newest versions of Wordpress have a theme viewer that will let you see what the first page of your content looks like before you activate a theme — this can give you a good idea of what might break. Another option is to install the new theme on a dupe of your website and move it over when you are satisfied. This, however, takes a little more work and since I like to live dangerously, I usually just do my switching late at night.

• Try and keep it similar

  If you aren’t big into coding, the best thing to do is pick a template that is similar in layout to what you would like your final theme to look like. Font sizes, Font colors and image banners can be easily swapped, but when you start doing heavy construction you find yourself knee-deep in someone else’s code which can leave you feeling like it might have been easier to start from scratch.

• Rely on plugins

  Plugins are incredible and you can usually find a plugin for everything that you want to do – why reinvent the wheel? If your theme doesn’t have a feature you would like, say tag clouds, rest assured you can find a plugin for it.

Now go forth and create.

This entry was posted Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Random musings, cool tech. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.