When we started teaching Websitetology—back then it was called Blogosopher—WordPress came with 2 themes. Beyond that, you were really on your own for customization. Now there are literally thousands available for free; however, the biggest problem is so many of them aren’t really ready to use unless you customize the hell out of them.
Buying a premium theme is fine, if you know how to find the right one- that’s done by a reputable developer and updated regularly- of course, this means you need to have a child theme installed or you’ll lose all your customizations.
That’s why this article is so useful:
Many businesses jump right to premium themes, but it’s totally possible to get by with free WordPress themes. Here, we look out how to do precisely that with a few great theme choices and plugin options.
Source: Why Pay? How to Get By with a Free WordPress Theme
The supply a list of free themes that look like they are custom themes- that have been well vetted- we concur, these are an excellent starter set to consider:
Twenty-Fifteen
Details: Any of the default WordPress themes work wonderfully. They’re made by Automattic, so you know they’re legitimate and reliable. Twenty-Fifteen has a simple design that’s all about putting your content first. The aim here is to make it so your visitors don’t have to hunt for everything. Navigation is straightforward, the text is easy to read, and the layout is responsive.
This theme is also translation-ready and can be customized to look pretty much however you want. Twenty-Fifteen is perfect if you don’t need a ton of features but want a clean theme for presenting your blog or simple business site to the world.
Details: For this theme, it’s all in the name, really. Customizr is easy to set up but doesn’t skimp on the customization options. Not by a long shot. It lets you design your site in live preview, so you always know precisely what your site is going to look like.The customization menu lets you select from over 135 different options, giving you the flexibility to build any kind of site you want. And if you want to delve deeper, the code is well documented, so you can extend it with hooks to your heart’s content.
Details: Colorway is another great free theme to consider. The design is so simple but really quite stunning to look at. It comes with a theme options panel for easy customization that can be used to customize the logo, backgrounds, footer, and analytics.
It can be installed with a single click, includes dummy content, is responsive, and includes a full-width template and additional styles for individual pages. Colorway is great for personal and business sites, alike.
Details: SociallyAwkward is a theme designed around social media, offering plenty of built-in social icons and share buttons to ensure you’re connecting with everyone on every network. It’s also ideal for displaying media hosting on social sites. You can post your own media, as well, of course.It’s responsive, includes multiple post format support and compatibility with the Custom Content Portfolio plugin. Plus, it looks pretty snazzy, too.
Details: Saga is a theme designed with writers in mind and it accomplishes the job pretty well. Makes sense since the designer is a writer, too. This theme offers gorgeous typography, a simple layout, and a structure that suits storytelling perfectly.
It also includes customization options so you can make it look however you want and integrates with the Literary plugin, providing additional convenience to you wordsmiths out there.
Details: If you just want to create a personal blog but want it to look a little different than the millions of other blogs out there, Blogly Lite is a good choice. This free theme is lightweight and utilizes the theme customizer for ultimate control over your site’s look and feel. Change colors, change logos, change backgrounds—whatever you want.
You also have control over the fonts used and you can customize the footer text with ease. Plus, the flat design is really current and appealing.
Details: Those looking to build a food-oriented site ought to enjoy the Perfetta theme. It’s ideal for café websites and includes all the features you’d need to build an intuitive and attractive experience for your customers. The theme is lightweight and responsive and includes a one-column layout for putting your content on display.
This minimalist theme is all about your content, which will hopefully include pictures of delicious food.Yum!
Details: Another theme worth looking into is Nictitate. This theme is perfect for portfolio and business sites, offering all the flexibility you need to build a truly custom site. It’s built on the KOPATHEME layout manager, so you can select the precise layout you want for each page of your site.It also includes unlimited sidebar support, widgets, and more.
Details: Parabola is a responsive theme that lets you customize just about everything. Seriously, you can customize the text and background colors, fonts and their sizes, site width, page layouts, and more. You can also show or hide certain design elements, include over 30 social icons, use shortcodes, customize a slider, and add or remove columns.
Other features include multiple post formats, post excerpts, Google Fonts, eight widget areas, a magazine layout, a blog layout, featured images, and more.
Details: Still another free theme you might want to consider is called Sparkling. It’s responsive and includes a minimal layout that can be adapted to suit just about any purpose. It was built on Bootstrap 3 and includes a fullscreen slider, author bios, popular posts, social icons, SEO support, and more.It also has a theme options panel that allows for full customization of the layout, fonts, colors, and slider effects. Sparkling is also translation ready and compatible with Contact Form 7, Jetpack, bbPress, and WPML.
Details: Arcade Basic puts a strong emphasis on imagery, yet still manages to be lightweight. This theme is responsive and allows for full customization of the header, site width, page layouts, and more. It also includes post formats, Google Fonts, and works with Jetpack for the displaying of galleries with both tiled and jQuery carousel view options.
Additionally, this theme is compatible with BuddyPress, bbPress, WooCommerce, and WPML.
Details: Don’t let its name fool you, Freak is a gorgeous theme that offers a parallax background in the header, and multiple customization options to keep you satisfied. It includes several blog layouts, a responsive slider, the ability to select the width of the sidebar, several menu bars, a navigation bar, search options, and more.
It’s also been tested on all mobile platforms and looks great on all of them. This responsive theme is quite versatile and actually really surprised me with its lack of a price tag.
Details: The last free theme I’m going to talk about here is called Evolve and it’s designed for use on any kind of site. It’s responsive and includes a parallax slider, a post slider with many animation effects, and a solid Bootstrap-based foundation. You can customize many aspects of this theme including the logo, header, background, colors, and fonts.
It includes FontAwesome icons, retina ready icons, CSS effects, infinite scroll, Google Fonts, image thumbnails, multiple blog layouts, 12 widget areas, custom widgets, social media integration, numerous navigation options, and more. It’s also compatible with WPML, BuddyPress, and bbPress.
Responsive theme is offers an intuitive foundation with a smooth grid system that spontaneously adjust the framework of your website to any mobile devices to give you an excellent user experience. This theme includes 9 Page Templates, 11 Widget Areas, 6 Template Layouts and 4 Menu Positions that you can use in organizing the main structure of your theme. It also provides simple yet fantastic theme options for full CMS control with easy logo upload, social media integration, incredible webmaster tools and many more. Responsive is also WooCommerce compatible to help to establish your own online shop without much effort. Other great features of this amazing theme include Multilingual Ready (WPML), RTL-Language Support, Retina-Ready, Search Engine Friendly, W3C Markup Validated and currently translated into 45 languages. Responsive is by far one of the most popular free WordPress themes with over 1 million downloads and counting.
Source: 50+ Best Free Responsive WordPress Themes 2015 – Colorlib
They maintain a long list of “Premium” style free themes here: http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/120-free-premium-wordpress-themes/
While we kind of miss the old days when changing themes wouldn’t scramble the presentation of your content, we fully understand why it’s become necessary. Until WordPress builds in a “Builder” to the core- expect to see a lot of variation in the way themes allow for content customization.
No matter what theme you pick, the biggest mistake people make using WordPress is not using the correct tools to organize their data. Putting critical data into Widgets for instance means there is no easy way to share that data specifically- and that’s one of the things Google looks at to rate your site.
Our seminar teaches you the right way to use the four organizing tools in WordPress: Posts, Pages, Categories and Tags to optimize your data for organic search. A theme is just like a book case to hold your books, notes, photo albums etc- unless you organize it correctly, you won’t be able to find it quickly later.
WooThemes, the team behind the wildly successful WooCommerce WordPress plugin, is getting themselves a new bankroll. Namely Automattic–yes, that Automattic–the company we can thank for WordPress itself.
The decision was detailed in a press release by WooThemes:
Over the past year, in response to the growing and more sophisticated requirements of the WooCommerce community, we have been exploring ways to accelerate our growth to be an even more accessible, easier to use, and enabling platform for our customers. We’ve met some very powerful and influential companies and potential investors, but none more ambitious and aligned with our values than the team at Automattic.
Source: WooThemes Joins Automattic
What are the implications of this move? We can easily expect to see baked-in integration with WooCommerce and the sites that are being hosted on the massive WordPress.com service.
And as for those who are hosting our WordPress sites independently like us, this likely means WooCommerce has cemented itself as the defacto eCommerce solution on WordPress in terms of theme and cross-plugin support.
This is something that was becoming true on its own prior to this announcement, so if you’re currently using any other WordPress shopping cart solutions out there like WP-Ecommerce or MarketPress, the time may come in the near future where you’ll need to move your operation to Woo.
Style guides can be an invaluable tool for your business in both physical and digital spaces. For example, if you are working with anyone else to make a website, or design a business card, having a style guide can go a long way in making sure everything is done right the first time.
Without one, you are sure to face constant back and forth communication for this information and multiple redesigns and rewrites when something doesn’t come out the way you want it.
Wikipedia defines a style guide as:
[A] set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization, or field. A style guide establishes and enforces style to improve communication. To do that, it ensures consistency (within a document and across multiple documents) and enforces best practice in usage and in language composition, visual composition, orthography (including spelling, capitalization, hyphenation, and other punctuation), and typography.
Source: Style guide – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DC’s 2015 Palette: Various Shades of Gray
Style guides go back a long time. If you take a peek at http://thestandardsmanual.com/ you will find the very first edition of the style guide for the New York City Transit Authority, published in 1970. Signage for the subways in NYC have such a distinctive look because the city created a style guide to provide a consistent message that would not be confused.
Style guides don’t have to be dozens of pages or be specifically about branding, either. Especially for smaller businesses, a single page with the correct color palette and some high-quality (preferably vector eg. .ai or .eps) files containing your logo can suffice.
The web is a perfect platform to host your style guide, but many companies have been hesitant to embrace the medium. For example, Apple’s latest style guide is a sprawling 197-page PDF. Not exactly terrific bathroom reading.
Uber, the private-contractor based cab company on your phone, is a company that most definitely embraces the web with it’s branding guideline website. Everything you need to know about the brand is freely available, and the appropriate logos are available to download without any hoops to jump through. It’s even built on WordPress, so you know we’re excited about it.
What it really means is that you don’t have to be a huge tech company to put out your own style guide, the foundation is out there for anyone regardless of technical or design backgrounds.