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65+ free exceptional Wordpress Themes worth investigating

Sun, Jan 25, 2009

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High-quality Wordpress themes are always worth investigating. Whether you are looking for some inspiration for creating your personal blog design or just looking for a theme that can be used directly this article will give you just what you need.

In this article we present 65+ free exceptional Wordpress themes. The themes included in this post have all been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks with Wordpress 2.7. All of the themes can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects.

WordPress is a very popular, mature and well-structured blog system. It’s really easy to get started using wordpress as there are hundreds of hosting companies that offer free scriptet setup if you’re not up for the challange yourself. The simplet way to get startet though is signing up on wordpress.com – and it’s free. Wordpress is quite popular… stats on wordpress.com today talk for themselves: 197,066 bloggers, 135,001 new posts, 35,802,196 words today.

Once you have your own blog you will probably start wondring how to get your own look and feel. It’s not as hard as you may think. WordPress has a large supporting community. There are many free WordPress themes on the Internet and you can easily change your default theme with a new one. Additionally, there are plugins (not covered in this post), which you can add to your WP blog to enhance its functionality, such as image galleries, statistics, anti-spam, etc. WordPress has all the basic functionality that bloggers rely on today auch as built-in search, archive, comments/trackback, importing, widgets etc.See all the features that WP offer out of the box here.

The article has been divided into 7 section to help you quickly find the type of Wordpress theme you need.

Section 1: What is a Wordpress Template and how to use it

Section 2: Calm, Simple, Minimalistic Themes

Section 3: Vibrant WordPress Themes

Section 4: Photoblog & Videoblog Themes

Section 5: Experimental Wordpress Themes

Section 6: Magazine style themes

Section 7: Sources and Further Resources

Section 1: What is a Wordpress Template and how to use it

Fundamentally, the WordPress Theme system is a way to change the look and feel of your weblog. WordPress Themes can provide significant control over the look and presentation of the material on your website.

A WordPress Theme is a collection of files that work together to produce a graphical interface with an underlying unifying design for a weblog. These files are called template files. A theme modifies the way the site is displayed, without modifying the underlying software or the content.

Changing the theme used.

WordPress supplies two themes in its distribution for your initial use. You can switch between these two themes using the admin panel. Themes that you add to that directory will appear in the Administration Panels > Design > Themes as additional selections.

Using other themes require that these are uploaded to the wp-content/themes folder in the server hosting your Wordpress blog. Below you find a simple 4 step howto that you can use to get started using the themes listed in this post.

Download the theme archive and extract the files it contains. You may need to preserve the directory structure in the archive when extracting these files. Follow the guidelines provided by your theme author.
Using an FTP client to access your host web server, create a directory to contain your theme in the wp-content/themes directory provided by WordPress. For example, a theme named Test should be in wp-content/themes/Test. Your theme may provide this directory as part of the archive.
Upload the theme files to the new directory on your host server.
Follow the instructions below for selecting the new theme.

Selecting the Active Theme

To select the active theme for your site:

Log in to the WordPress Administration Panels.
Select the Design subpanel, then Themes.
From the Available Themes section, click on theme title (or theme screenshot) for the theme you wish to activate.
A preview of the theme will be shown to activate theme click the Activate “Theme Name” link in the top right.

Your selection should immediately become active.

See the Using Themes guide on codex.wordpress.orgfor further reading..