Introducing Themes: The Best WordPress Themes

Hiring a web designer or design firm for your website project is usually best if you can afford it, but if you have a small budget, or if you don’t want to spend too much money up-front on a project you are just starting, you can find some quality WordPress themes to use at affordable prices. You can spend under $100 to purchase a few themes to experiment with to see what works best, or you can ask your hired web designer to choose from premium themes to customize to your tastes at a lower price than custom development. This is a minimal cost when compared to the thousands of dollars you might spend on a designer or design firm to create a custom solution when you may not have that kind of budget.

WordPress isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It took the lead in brand strength over competitors in 2010, and it continues to bring in the most weekly downloads of any other platform in its class.

There are many talented theme designers and developers coming out of the woodwork to create impressive WordPress themes at great prices (and sometimes free), and the quality of these themes has been increasing as well as the number of themes available. So a new Themes section was created to showcase the best of the best in WordPress themes so you can spend less time looking for those great themes and more time doing what you love. Hours of work have been put into finding these high-quality themes from the various, trusted theme development sites, and this section will continue to be updated regularly as some of the best new themes are released.

For now, only WordPress themes will be featured here. Showcasing themes for other platforms was considered, but unfortunately there aren’t as many to choose from, and of the themes that are available, there aren’t as many that could be featured as quality themes. So until theme development picks up for those other platforms, this section will feature WordPress themes only.

Some of these themes are free, but most are premium themes that offer some type of support. Offering support is very important in theme development, especially with security risks and the ongoing WordPress updates. There are many free themes out there, but many free themes are not of the quality that you get from a premium theme, and some free themes can be tainted with harmful encrypted code, so you should be aware of this risk when downloading free themes from other websites. The free themes that are featured here are from trusted theme developers, so that risk is minimized, but it is still something you should be aware of and watch out for. There are also many free themes – even higher-quality themes – that do not offer the type of support that premium themes offer, and many free themes offer no support at all. This means that when WordPress is updated and your theme’s code needs editing, or if you run into other issues with the code – the theme developer may not be around help.

If a theme is listed in this directory, then it means that it has passed these guidelines:

• The design is impressive and professional.
• You can purchase and/or download the theme from a trusted theme development site.
• The theme developer offers support and has not abandoned the theme.

As you browse, you will notice eight categories for the Themes section. Obviously, WordPress is primarily a blogging platform, but for the purpose of this directory, the ‘blog’ category will represent personal and professional blog themes for sites that define themselves as news/blog or magazine-style sites. Here is a description of each category:

• Blog – Professional and Personal blog themes. (i.e. News websites, Magazine-style sites, or personal journals, etc.)
• Portfolio – Themes for displaying portfolios (i.e. Designers, artists, photographers, etc.)
• Business – Themes for corporate/company sites.
• Retail – Themes for ecommerce sites.
• Restaurant – Themes for those places where you go to eat food.
• Minimal – The only stylistic category in this section (for now). Because many of you like those minimal themes.
• Premium – Themes that you pay for and that offer support and sufficient documentation.
• Free – Some of the free themes out there that are well-designed and that offer support as well.

You will notice that there aren’t any color or stylistic categories except for ‘Minimal’ at this time. More categories like this were considered, but most premium themes offer a variety of colors and some also allow for different textures and styles to be chosen, so most of those specific style categories were ruled out for this reason.

I hope you enjoy this new section. The goal of the Themes section is the same as the main gallery’s goal – to feature the best of the best in web design. The difference in this new section is that you can use these designs for your own projects. :)