Chapter 18. Ten Free WordPress Themes

In This Chapter

  • Finding good WordPress themes

  • Using popular WordPress themes to style your blog

Because I'm a WordPress theme developer and designer, this chapter was probably the most difficult for me to put together. I know, I know ... I was thinking the same thing as you: "Ten great WordPress themes — no big deal!" Yet it's a very big deal because the themes available for WordPress number in the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. Many of these themes are excellent, and picking a mere ten was really tough. The list I present here isn't exhaustive by any means. Chapters 11, 12, and 13 give you a few more resources to find a theme that suits your needs.

I kept these criteria in mind when choosing the following themes:

  • User-friendly: The best themes incorporate as much detail as possible to let the theme user just load the theme and start blogging without a whole lot of fuss and muss. You can use these themes directly out of the box, but usually, they have a whole lot more to offer if you want to tinker. The key is that you don't have to tinker.

  • Compatible with widgets: Themes that are set up to use WordPress sidebar widgets are the most user-friendly. Widgets are wonderful, and they make your blogging life incredibly easy by giving you drag-and-drop functionality and control of the content that appears in your sidebar. (If you don't know what widgets are, flip back to Chapter 5.)

  • Free price tag: 2007 saw a boom in popularity of premium themes, ...

Get WordPress® for Dummies®, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.