Choosing the Right WordPress Theme
I hope you people might have noticed that I have two blogs, one is this- Techkeyla, and the other one is OneKnightStands or as most of my mates call it- OKS. It was launched alongside Techkeyla, last year when I joined the independently blogging band-wagon and left the Blogger camp. Things have been great since. Visitors multiplied, my posts got linked and I got readers from all across the world. But unfortunately I haven’t been able to write as much. So to break the hibernation, I thought of redesigning the theme. I was happy with the previous theme for it supporting my long posts and clarity of font. But I needed change. After all it was a year old. So I began my hunt for the perfect wordpress theme to work on.
Sources of Free WordPress Themes.
My search began with a google search, but it was just not quite adequate. So, the search led me to multiple other blogs and other sources which I am sharing with you.
1. Smashing Magazine
Just love this blog and the exhaustive amount of sources these guys have. Check the following posts e.g.
100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes
83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen
2.The next huge resource for anything wordpress is Mashable. For themes, I seeked help from the following posts.
And then there are numerous other blogs providing lists of numerous WordPress Themes. Some of them are listed below (after the jump).
49 Most Downloaded WordPress Themes Of All Time
45+ Free Premium WordPress Themes with Magazine or Grid Layouts
20 Free Corporate WordPress Themes
50 Beautiful Free WordPress Themes
21 Mindblowing Premium-Like Free WordPress Themes
24 High Quality Free WordPress Themes
50 Beautiful Free WordPress Themes
15 High Quality Premium-Like Free WordPress Themes
That’s more or less like 700 plus WordPress themes at your disposal. Not necessarily, you often find some repetitions. But even after that, that’s a lot of Themes. And if you are still hungry, eat this.
413 BEST FREE WORDPRESS THEMES OF 2008
So the total now has reached 1113 plus. All of them are free and for yours to download. And now the task begins of choosing the right one for you. The criteria for selection of a particular theme may be manifold, but I tried considering the following factors.
a: Background Colour : Dark vs. White :- This is a never ending debate, but for me White is the colour. Because the blog is one with long posts and one which should be soothing to the eyes, so have tried avoiding bright colours.
b: 2 columns vs. 3 colums vs. 4 colums :- 3 colums always for me as it gives me more space to have my widgets and other contents.Also, my 3 column theme is one which has a left and right sidebar with text in the middle. This gives the blog a more arranged look and are proved to be more Adsense friendly.
c: Text Space: This matters a lot as the blog has a lot of text and also images which it should accommodate.
d: Magazine vs. Grid : Magazine layouts are good, but they shorten up the texts in the homepage, which is not acceptable. Grids are good.
e: Flexible Width vs. Fixed Width : My previous theme was a flexible width, but I chose to have a fixed width this time. There are various advantages for fixed width like uniform layout for all screensizes, which means header images will always remain symmetric, any change in side widget images, or posts text would not affect theme lay-out, which is a problem with flexible width.
f. Lastly, your will to incorporate change. If you find interesting design and portions in different themes, you can always mix and match, provided you credit the source.
Of all the wordpress themes I previewed and tested the demos, I tried quite a few of them which I will mention in the next post. I finally opted for Velocity theme (Source: BlogOhBlog) designed by Jai Nischal Verma. I have done quite a bit of tweaking on the theme and shall talk about that in part -II and also let you know of the continuous changes that I plan to make on the blog theme of Techkeyla as well OKS.
See you in Part -II. Cheers!!!
great collection
thanks
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can you please share which theme I should go for my new blog, which I want to start. It is going to be a tech blog.
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Great collection of resources mate! Appreciate the hard work. Specially liked the criteria for selection of theme.
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Internet Explorer 8 is very good because it is as stable as Opera. I hate the previous versions of IE like IE6 because it hangs frequently. .
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