With tens of thousands—or maybe millions—of WordPress themes available, how do you know where to go to look for one?
You can always search for “free WordPress themes” (Google returned about 51,300,000 matches) or “premium WordPress themes” (only 19, 100,000 matches). It doesn’t sound very efficient, but it does provide a way to find the latest offerings, which isn’t a bad idea, because themes are getting better and better.
You can review old favorites, like:
Or you can try sites that provide lists of themes, like these:
Remind your client not to purchase a theme until you’ve had a chance to check it out: Will it really do what you need it to do? Is it reasonably easy to customize? Does it seem buggy? How’s the support?
Let us know if you have other favorites.
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Great list, Laurie. The more we talk about this, the more the process gets refined. A few more tips on looking for a theme below.
— Layout: layout is more difficult to change/customize than colors. So look for the number of columns you want, the position of the header, footer, featured article, sidebars, etc. rather than if it’s purple or blue.
— Features: have a quick read through the list of features (if there is a list). One thing that’s been popular lately and extremely helpful is automatic thumbnail generation. Saves loads of time. Does it have multiple page templates? Does it have some features that maybe others don’t? Maybe some back-end/WP admin tools you can use that give you more control of the site without going under the hood — or paying your developer to go under the hood? Most of the links above have these features.
— Searching for themes: I honestly do a Google search for new themes for just about every new client. Sounds crazy, but there always news ones and it’s the only way to keep up to date. So try to use smart keywords. For example, “free wordpress magazine themes” or “free clean wordpress themes” etc.
— Testing: if you have the time, try downloading a few (if they’re free) and uploading them to your site if you have one. If not, try out their demo site. Poke around, go to category pages, single pages. Does it have drop-down menus? Do they work well? Does it have a featured article? Does that work well?
— Reviews: This can be harder to find, but if the theme has a forum, check it out. Are there loads of gripes about broken features? Of course, forums are, almost by definition, full of gripes, but you should be able to judge if they’re just whining or if there’s truly trouble.
Whew!
Hpe that helps.
Bradley
Laurie,
Found another good listing of both themes and theme sites (sites that list themes both free and premium). Blogging Experiment.
Awesome list, Laurie. I ran across it while I was tweaking the SEO on my own recent post about the same topic. Small world, eh? And we happen to like a lot of the same themes.
http://www.thewatermarkgroup.org/wordpress/where-to-find-great-wordpress-themes-for-developers/