Having a cool website is important today as everyone’s expectations towards look and feel, usability and quality are sky high. Recently WordPress has shown great strength when used as a publishing platform for traditional websites using for example WordPress magazine themes to build online magazines and news portals. Furhter for small business sites using business WordPress themes. This is partly because WordPress is a free, mature and extremely easy to use system, but also because the supply of cool WordPress themes is increasing rapidly. Even today a lot of online shop run on WordPress. Setting up an online shop using WordPress e-commerse themes makes it as easy to get started as ever. WordPress CMS itself constantly improve however the theme developers also innovate and think out of the box when it comes to extending WordPress standard features. Many cool WordPress themes today include shortcode systems, page templates, custom widgets, typography modules, SEO capabilities, good support and much more and they don’t have to be expensive at all! For this article I have created a collection of really cool WordPress themes to help you quickly build cool websites. We recently updated this post with more cool themes and checked all links!
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and I will earn a commission if you purchase through those links (at no extra cost to you). I recommend that you do your own independent research before purchasing any product or service. This article is not a guideline, a recommendation or endorsement of specific products.
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NOVA Elegant Cool WordPress Theme
Nova is a sharp, simplistic design that makes for an intuitive user experience. Nova’s biggest strength is its homepage, which allows you to organize your content into two areas. The Featured Slider is perhaps the most versatile slider we have built, and comes with multiple slider variations that breath new life into the design.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by ElegantThemes (Premium theme)
8CELLS Creative and Cool WordPress Theme
8Cells is the WordPress Portfolio theme, Creative built with latest WordPress features. Custom Post Type, Shortcodes, Extensive admin panel etc.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (premium theme)
ARES Clean WordPress theme
Ares is The Clean Magazine, News and Blog Template built with latest WordPress features.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (premium theme)
AVENUE Cool WordPress theme
Avenue is a feature-rich WordPress magazine theme and is suitable for almost any niche. The theme comes with an inbuilt review system and 3 post formats (videos, audio & galleries). The homepage layout is very flexible, you can built your own layout using the 3 homepage widgets. You can also easily change the skin so it fits your needs!
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (premium theme)
ZENKO MAGAZINE
Zenko WordPress magazine theme is a stylish & colorful theme intended for those who want to launch a magazine or blog! The flexible layout allows you to easily adapt your content to the theme.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by WPZoom (premium theme)
SIMPLE PORTFOLIO
The Simple Portfolio is the ultimate solution for a powerful, yet minimal portfolio based theme. The theme is designed with an unobtrusive, minimal approach that focuses the viewers attention to the artwork displayed on the site.
The Simple Portfolio displays imagery and text beautifully in a clean layout. Portfolio’s are manged as categories, and can be displayed in a 1, 2 or 3 column layout. The theme utilizes custom post types to manage featured slides and blog entries, while all portfolio content is added using traditional WordPress posts. Creating a beautifully simple and professional portfolio site has never been easier than with the Simple Portfolio.
MORE INFO by Organic Themes(premium theme)
SIMPLEPRESS – Corporate Simple WordPress Theme
SimplePress is a simple and clean page-based corporate WordPress theme. It is great for anyone looking to give their website professional look and feel. The theme features a business style homepage with a beautiful well integrated JavaScript slider and clear hierarchy, as well as fully functional Blog and Gallery sections.
This theme is part of the very interesting Theme Club at ElegantThemes where everyone can get access to around 70 very professional themes at around half the price of most Premium themes. This is in particular interesting for web designers as they will be able to deliver great websites to their clients. It is even possible to get the PSD files also if some changes will be needed. Check out the video showing the ElegantThemes options framework enabling high flexibility with no-coding needed.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by ElegantThemes (Premium theme)
ACCENT Corporate Portfolio Theme
Accent is the WordPress CMS theme for Business, Portfolio, Corporate built with latest WordPress features. Custom Post Type, Unlimited Colors, Extensive admin panel etc.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (premium theme)
CHAMELION – WordPress Portfolio Theme
Chameleons are known for their ability to change the color of their skin. The patterns and color combinations you find in chameleons are almost endless, and our new theme is no different! Chameleon was created to be a simple and professional theme with loads of customization options that do not require web development experience to utilize.
MORE INFO / DEMO by ElegantThemes (premium theme)
MINIMALISTO
Minimalisto is a clean and minimalist business Premium WordPress Theme suitable for business, corporate, company and any kind of websites. Minimalisto is fully customizable using the theme options page! This is a good pick among the many Cool WordPress Themes available.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (premium theme)
SWAGGER
Swagger is built on top of the all-new version 2 of the Theme Blvd framework. Use the layout builder to accomplish just about anything you could ever think of. Use the slider manager to create as many sliders as you want. Use the widget area manager to create as many widget areas and sidebars as you want. With just the right amount of theme options and flexibility, the power is all in your hands. And with a sleek, responsive HTML5 design, you’ll be sure no one will miss out on your new website built with Swagger.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (premium theme)
CLASSICA – Minimalistic WordPress Portfolio Theme
Classica is a beautifully minimalistic portfolio theme, free from gimmick and trend, making your talent the focal point of your portfolio – the way it should be. Present your work in a professional manor with a timeless design.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (Premium theme)
ELIST
eList is a verstile clean and simple Directory WordPress Theme. Using eList, you can create an online directory of any type, and allow your visitors to submit new listings from the front end. The theme also comes with eCommerce integration, allowing you to charge your visitors for new or featured listings.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by ElegantThemes (Premium theme)
BRICK+ MASON
Brick + Mason is ideal for photographers and/or design studios. It utilizes infinite scrolling so users don’t have to leave the page to experience all your talent. This theme also uses the jQuery masonry plugin so the content will fit any browser size.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (Premium theme)
DAILYNOTES
The purpose of DailyNotes is to make the simplest and most elegant medium possible through which you could share your daily life. The theme is very minimal in its design, and has been trimmed down to the bare essentials. For anyone looking to create a fun and inviting personal blog, I’m confident that DailyNotes will serve you well!
MORE INFO / DEMO – by ElegantThemes (Premium theme)
AWARE
Aware is a clean and simple interactive, responsive portfolio theme perfect for freelancers, web designers, photographers and videographers alike. Its user interactive interface delightfully enhances your most loved portfolio pieces. Now, you can take your portfolio with you, in your pocket.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (premium theme)
DUOTIVE THREE
This is the ultimate portfolio theme with a very easy and powerful administration tool.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (Premium theme)
FEATHER
This theme has a light and airy quality that gives your website a fun and care-free vibe. It is a clean wordpress theme and it is simple, but at the same time it has subtle details and textures. If you are looking for a subdued design that is still stylistic and impressive, then Feather just might be the theme for you. It comes with several page templates, CMS style font page, sliders, portfolio capabilities, shortcodes and much more. Feather was created by ElegantThemes and Seriously I believe they have one of the best and most reasonable prices WordPress Themes offerings.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Elegant Themes (premium theme)
DANDELION – Powerful Elegant WordPress Theme
Dandelion is a Powerful Premium WordPress Portfolio Theme. This theme provides all the main functionality you will need to present your products, work and yourself in an elegant and professional style. The Dandelion theme is highly flexible, so changing the color scheme is super simple and for the most parts you won’t need an image editor. The theme is best suited for any business, portfolio, photography and personal sites. This theme allows you to build your own custom skin just by selecting your favorite colors from the admin panel with a color picker. Additionally, there are 32 custom patterns that you can choose between for the body.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (Premium theme)
MODEST – Simple Cool WordPress Theme
A minimal cool WordPress theme with beautiful typography and subtle gradients from Elegant Themes and it certainly belongs in this list of Minimal WordPress CMS Themes.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by ElegantThemes (Premium theme)
STRIKING – Premium Corporate & Portfolio WP Theme
Striking is number 3 on Themeforest at the moment. It is a powerful and flexible wordpress theme. The author calls it a “Super Premium” theme as it has extraordinary features and coding that are not found in the normal premium WP theme. Well you have to decide for your self on this one. Fonts, colors, backgrounds, widgets, images, videos, sliders, menus. blogs, portfolios, logos and anything else is completely adjustable with the admin. The author says: “There are so many short codes I have lost count, and they are widget friendly”. Furthermore, the Striking admin includes a custom CSS integrator so you don’t need to play around with CSS files.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (Premium theme)
FOLIOWAY – Premium Portfolio WordPress Theme
Folioway is a perfect pixel WordPress theme, not only its clean and elegant, it also comes with tons of features like amazing slider, unlimited colors, etc. It’s incredibly powerful and flexible and easy to use! It is just the best wordpress theme for your or your company’s work presentation!
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (Premium theme)
GOOD MINIMAL
Good Minimal is a responsive HTML5 & CSS3 , clean and minimalist style theme that is good for portfolio, blogs and businesses. This theme is flexible and is used media queries to adapt screen sizes, whether it is iPhone, iPad and wide screens.
VIDEOZOOM
Videozoom is an elegant theme with a neat featured slider, which is ready to play any videos you want to embed into your posts. Easily configurable slider on homepage which allows you to showcase your featured videos. This theme was designed to play any videos from sites, like YouTube, Vimeo, and even self-hosted videos with JW Player integration.
MORE INFO / DEMO by WPZoom (premium theme)
VideoPlus
Cool new video theme Theme Junkie with a clean and modern look and feel.
MORE INFO by theme junkie(premium theme)
ECHOES – Premium WordPress 11 in 1
Echoes Premium theme for WordPress is designed for rapid development of portfolio or business websites. 3 Featured Mainpage styles, 5 Portfolio Page Styles, 19 Shortcodes, working Contact Page Ajax Validated Template and more. It features numbered , thumbnail slides , content objects/elements, carousels, full-width pages, on hover icons with light-box supported images and videos, drop-down menus, multi-column footers and others to make it easy for you to customize and get it online quickly. 11 Skins with variations of Bright, Dark, Red , Blue , Green, Yellow and Brown, and Shaded version with a textured background for easy background customization.
MORE INFO / DEMO by theme forest (premium theme)
MAZINE
Flexible WordPress e-commerce theme, with WP e-commerce plugin, ajax contact form, animated sortable gallery and much much more.
DEMO / MORE INFO – by Themeforest (premium theme)
NEWSCAST 4 in 1
Newscast is a WordPress Theme, best suited for Magazines and Blogs. It comes with 3 fantastic Image and News slideshows has multiple Page templates and of course gives you the option to choose from 4 Fantastic skins
MORE INFO / DEMO by theme forest (premium theme)
KARMA – Clean and Modern WordPress Theme
Number TWO on Themeforest is Karma. It is a Premium WordPress Theme built on what the author calls “a highly intelligent framework”. It’s the only theme on Themeforest to feature the new CU3ER v1 3D slider – it’s actually cool. It comes with lots of features and whether your a wordpress pro or just a beginner you should be able to manage this theme.
MORE INFO / DEMO by theme forest (premium theme)
UNITE
In an update of this post I stumbled into themeforest and found that there are actually a lot of nice wordpress magazine themes found there. Unite is one of them and is a top pick in this collection.
MORE INFO / DEMO by theme forest (premium theme)
PARACHUTE – minimalistic business cool wordpress theme
Parachute is clean, colorful and minimalistic theme ideal for businesses and portfolio work. It comes with administration options that allow you to fully control the layout of the site and create unique page designs with excellent shortcodes.
MORE INFO / DEMO by theme forest (premium theme)
WHITELIGHT
Whitelight features a clean and responsive design, customized modular homepage, portfolio functionality. Further it offers integration with WooCommerce (child theme) for e-commerce features.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by WooThemes (premium theme)
WEBLY
Webly Premium WordPress Theme comes with different color variations where also the hand-drawn illustration change e.g. blue, black, green and purple. The hand-drawn landscape on the homepage is a fun way to catch the interest of your visitors, but the theme also give the options to toggle the drawing off if it does not suite you. There is a simple and quite standard dropdown menu at the top. This is for sure one of the best premuim WordPress themes. See full review here. This vendor have developed many Cool WordPress Themes also worth checking out.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by ElegantThemes (Premium theme)
BRIEFED
This is a cool WordPress photo theme from WooThemes (know as one of the best theme vendors and they have released many Cool WordPress Themes). It has been specifically designed for freelancers, designers, agencies and creative types to showcase portfolios but it also will be used for traditional website and blogging. Briefed features a very customizable homepage and comes with various useful page templates. Other features include a custom post type powered portfolio section, 9 alternative colour schemes, custom widgets, unique and powerful options panel.
MORE INFO / DEMO by woothemes (premium theme)
FUZIO AGENZY
Fuzio is a great theme for the creative agency, freelancer or general business. It’s dark side will highlight your content in addition to the dynamic color touch. Fuzio has many features and as an example it allows you to set a Custom Page Illustration for each individual post, page and portfolio project. A super-quick way to improve the beauty and elegance of your site.
MORE INFO / DEMO – by Themeforest (premium theme)
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Can you include the Proton theme? it’s another free premium Wordpress theme which got a lot of great feedback: http://www.intenseblog.com/wordpress/theproton-brand-new-free-premium-wordpress-theme.html
All templates look interesting. I will definitely give try to one of the templates on my wordpress site. Thanks for collecting the best of free themes.
These are some great wordpress themes for anyone who wants to build a website and the fact that they’re free is even better! I give kudos to graphic designers because to me, it seems so complicated but I would have to attend a great graphic design school like FIDM in LA to really learn the craft right and make those connections
Thanks so much for sharing!
I am always looking for inspiration when it comes to my designs. I found this collection very interesting and there are some really good and interesting designs. I agree with your idea about peoples expectations about look and feel and it is an important part I think about when designing my own work. With the collection you have put together I think you have definitely got that cool feeling. I really like the designs for Parachute and Karma. I like the clean feel to the designs and the use of colour. There is a good mix in this collection and this will a constant resource for me in the future when I am approaching my designs, especially in WordPress.
this is a nice showcase of elegant themes… especially ‘Duotive 2WO’ is surely a great one!!! thanks for sharing this post..
Great job on the list, Trip Wire! You guys run a great blog and do some great round-up articles like this. Some of these designs are just beautiful.
Awesome collection thanks for this.
Some nice themes. Great for inspiration and to get some ideas flowing! Nice one!
Really cool themes. I’ve been using a custom theme for my business and I like it a lot. I particularly like the ARES Clean WordPress theme due to its clean layout.
Cool page. We’ve seen most of these before, but picked up one or two new ones – Webly in particular. There definitely are some gems in this collection. Dandelion is an old favorite of ours. Thanks.
great great themes! I prefer to make my own because I always need to make changes and additions to already existing themes – the method I use is to recreate a similar layout in Lubith and then I make some changes in the code and add some gallery and content-related plugins. They are not hard to copy if you use flexible enough tools.
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