Free WordPress themes, where for art thou?

WordPress has all but become the content management system (CMS) of choice be it for traditional use as a blog, a magazine style website, or even a company website. The community of people behind WordPress from the core development team through to the theme developers have made it what it is today.

WordPress takes minutes to install, minutes to set up, and minutes to theme. It’s about as simple as it gets, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it isn’t capable of huge things. Apart from the ease of use, WordPress is my CMS of choice because of the theme community. There are so many people developing both free and premium themes these days that you can find anything you’re after, just Google ‘wordpress themes‘ and tell me I’m wrong..

Some of my favourite theme developers have their code so neatly laid out that it’s so simple to work through and see which bits of code performs each individual function. For me I’ve actually found this to be such a strong educational tool that it’s a rarity that I even head over to the WordPress forums to ask questions now days.

So here’s my list of developers with free themes that you should check out to learn how to put together your own custom WordPress theme.

• Blue Zinfandel by Bryan Gardner – In my opinion Bryan’s CSS has got to be the cleanest and most well arranged out of any WordPress theme designer. I’ve used the Blue Zinfandel 3-column theme on this blog before and it’s very easy to tweak. Bryan also has a number of premium themes, known under the common name of ‘Revolution Theme’. Bryan has a number of free themes which you can find by scrolling toward the bottom of this page.
• Mimbo is a free magazine styled theme designed by Darren Hoyt, there is also a premium version. Darren is another one who writes his code in a clear and concise manner making it easy to tweak to suit your purpose. Darren has also authored the next theme….
• Agregado. Agregado first came to my attention via an article on Smashing Magazine, Agregao is a new breed of themes that has a built in ‘life stream’ that allows you to automatically retrieve your activities across multiple social networking sites and have it all appear along side your blog. It’s really damn cool, and with a bit of tweaking can be made to suit almost any personal blog writers needs.

All of the before mentioned WordPress themes are ones that I have used for various projects, be it my own website or for websites I’ve put together for friends. The following themes are ones that I haven’t used, but are very well put together and are worth checking out.

• YGo CMS
• Structure
• Jello Wala Mello (best name ever)
• Gridlock
• Simplicity (delivers exactly what it says)
• Arthemia (I use the premium version at www.coolandstuff.com)
• Carrington Theme (this is one I really want to spend a lot of time playing with)

I’ve probably given you too much information here, I really hope you bookmark this and come back to it as a resource list.

WordPress has an awesome amount of power and in the right developers hands can take your blog, personal website, business website, to the next level.

If you’ve got any comments let me know, if you’ve got any questions or would like to know more about hiring a decent WordPress developer, let me know.

Cheers, Mat