Why Limit Media

10 Best Free WordPress Themes You Haven’t Seen

When it comes to blog­ging and online con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems, one name is spo­ken more often than any other: Word­Press. This amaz­ingly user-​​friendly, endlessly-​​customizable frame­work is an open source project that has rev­o­lu­tion­ized the online com­mu­nity since its cre­ation in 2003. Crop­ping up on hun­dreds of thou­sands of sites across the inter­web with eager users and com­mu­nity cre­ated plu­g­ins to enhance per­for­mance, this pro­gram­ming pow­er­house shows no signs of slow­ing down.

With so many sites on the band­wagon, design­ers and devel­op­ers have answered the call by bring­ing a mul­ti­tude of WordPress-​​ready themes to keep sites look­ing fresh and new. Given the pop­u­lar­ity of the prod­uct, these themes make waves when they land in the cyber sea and find­ing exam­ples that have not been widely used can be dif­fi­cult and a lit­tle bit intim­i­dat­ing. How­ever, after scour­ing the vast recesses of the web, we have found a few gems that you may not have seen before. Here are some of the stand­outs we hap­pened to uncover.

Per­fec­tom Theme

Fea­tures

• Opti­mized for all browsers
• XHTML/​CSS valid
• Fixed width
• 2 columns

This theme offers a clean, very sleek setup for your web­site. It seems like it would be ide­ally suited for a fash­ion blog of some kind. Very crisp, overall.

CSS Gallery Theme

Fea­tures

• Built in tagging
• Google ads and a side­bar block with 125 x 125 ban­ner ads
• Valid XHTML 1.0 tran­si­tional and valid CSS

Tech­ni­cally this theme was built as a base for a CSS/​website gallery, and won­der­fully so, how­ever, per­son­ally I think the design also lends itself to being used greatly as a port­fo­lio or as a gen­eral show­case gallery.

Lan­git Theme

Fea­tures

• Clean and simple
• 3 columns
• Side­bar wid­get ready
• XHTML + CSS valid
• Tested in Fire­fox, Inter­net Explorer 6, Opera, and Safari
• Com­pat­i­ble with Word­Press 2.5 and below
• Logo PSD and font are included in the package

This is sim­ply a won­der­ful theme for any­one look­ing to orga­nize an in-​​depth blog or man­age con­tent that requires mul­ti­ple cat­e­gory list­ings and also needs a lot of fea­tures. This theme meets both of those stip­u­la­tions with grace and ease.

Linol­una Theme

Fea­tures

• Lean and sim­ple CSS
• Grid Lay­out
• Tabbed Nav­i­ga­tion
• Slideshow ani­mated fea­tured arti­cles on front page

An extremely deep mag­a­zine theme suited mag­nif­i­cently for multi-​​author blogs. Among its many acces­si­ble fea­tures is a fan­tas­tic sta­tis­tics cal­cu­la­tor in each post which includes total com­ments, total views, author name, cat­e­gory, date, and an email address, not to men­tion the print function.

Mono­chrome Gallery Theme

Fea­tures

• Cus­tom admin panel
• Eas­ily cus­tomize theme
• Four wid­getized areas
• More home­page content
• Author Archives
• Two page templates
• No edit­ing themes files
• Blue­print CSS
• Valid XHTML and CSS

Mono­chrome Gallery is a free wid­getized theme for Word­Press pack­aged with an author archives page, AJAX slideshow, cat­e­go­rized posts with thumb­nails on the home­page, and a CSS frame­work to aid in cus­tomiza­tion. Need I say more?

Small Mag­a­zine Theme

Fea­tures

• Unique and fresh design
• Wid­getized Sidebar
• 125×125 ad spots
• 250×250 adsense spot
• Eas­ily cus­tomiz­able using CSS
• Cus­tom 404 Error page
• Fixed width
• Right Side­bar
• Built in Flickr support
• Styled Pag­i­na­tion
• Built in Gravatar
• Valid CSS & HTML

Here we have a fully loaded mag­a­zine theme packed with fea­tures. Com­pletely ready to launch your online pub­li­ca­tion style site with a built in photo gallery and fea­tured arti­cles sec­tions. If it’s a mag­a­zine theme you need, look no further.

Arthemia Theme

Fea­tures

• Drop Down Menus
• Auto­matic image resiz­ing for thumbnails
• Gra­vatar Support
• 3 col­umn with enhanced footer

On the other hand, when you need the per­fect bal­ance between a mag­a­zine type setup and blog, then this is your theme. You get the mag­a­zine head­ers and fea­tured arti­cles, with an ordered post sec­tion below a fea­tured cat­e­gory break.

Iso­lated Theme

Fea­tures

• Con­tains search, author, and links page templates.
• Mootool Accor­dion for bulk post display.
• Collapsible/​expandable sidebar.
• XHTML1.0 Tran­si­tional
• Side­bar is above footer, and has 3 columns.
• GD Image Titles (Can be dis­abled via Theme Options Page)
• Tested in IE7, IE6, Fire­fox 1.5, and Opera 9

Prob­a­bly the most unique theme I have seen in a while, this visu­ally stun­ning theme, not to men­tion how tech­ni­cally inter­est­ing it is, makes me think of flip­ping through a book. An easy addi­tion to the list, with­out ques­tion. I expect to see this crop­ping up all over the web.

Glut­tony Theme

Fea­tures

• Two-​​column
• Widget-​​ready
• Rounded-​​corners

Yet another fine exam­ple of a con­tent based theme. Mean­ing it is sim­ple and clean while still offer­ing a vari­ety of fea­tures. Though none of that detracts from let­ting the con­tent shine through.

The Morn­ing After Theme

Fea­tures

• Clean grid-​​based design
• Sup­port for Word­Press widgets
• A three-​​column home page
• Fea­tured post highlighting
• Asso­ci­at­ing images/​thumbnails with recent posts
• Cus­tomiz­able logo/​header image
• Easy CSS classes for adding cap­tions and wrap­ping text around images in posts
• Sup­port for asides
• Option for read­ers to e-​​mail posts to friends
• Option to switch to a print-​​friendly view to print posts

The theme was cre­ated based on a brief sur­vey on the Word­Press forums about what peo­ple would want to see in a unique magazine-​​style theme. Nice show­case lay­out for your recent posts.

Bonus Ver­sa­til­ity Lite

Fea­tures

• Two-​​collumn theme
• Ad-​​ready
• Wid­getized Sidebar
• Fea­tured Post
• Drop­down CSS Menus
• Inte­grated related posts, social book­mark­ing but­tons and more

As a bonus we decided to add a new theme that was just released this week. It’s a nice sim­ple and clean blog theme released under the Cre­ative Com­mons License.

What under­used themes have you dis­cov­ered recently on your trips around the web that you think would have made a nice addi­tion to the list?