Choosing a new theme
The hardest job is choosing a theme! Fortunately there are sites that have gone to the trouble of compiling lists of many of the available themes out there. Here’s a few that I find particularly useful:
WordPress ThemeViewer: Has some nice sort functions and you can click on “test run” to give you a live working example of the theme.
WordPress Theme List: List of themes sorted by number of columns amongst other criteria. Also gives a list of widgets plugin ready themes (but you can find out more widget ready themes here).
How to Blog’s Comprehensive list of 980+ themes: This is huge and conveniently lets you know whether it’s WP2.0+ compatible, number of columns and whether there’s support for Widgets or not.
Alex King’s theme browser: I think these themes come from Alex’s theme competions. There’s heaps and you can quickly see what each theme will look like.
There are also quite a few sites that blog about new themes like Wordpresstheme.com and BloggingPro. For examples of interesting/lovely themes (but not necessarily ones you can download), check out WordPress Garden.
Stuff to be aware of when choosing a theme:
- Support for WordPress 2.0
- Support for the Widgets plugin
- Support for other plugins, nifty features
- Number of Columns
- Page templates included (eg archives/links) - you can make these yourself but it saves time and effort if they’ve done it for you
- Special stylesheets, eg for print or mobile
- How easily customisable is it? Some themes come with a Photoshop file so that you can easily insert your own images into the theme.
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