Themes, also called templates are the coded software packages that give your website its look. Although there are more important steps to take first, choosing a theme is often the first thing someone does when they decide they want a website or blog. There are thousands of themes available, many for free, some for a price.
Making The Choice
Choosing the theme you want to use for your site can be a very difficult process. WordPress comes with two themes included, but most people decide to use something different. There are so many themes to choose from that the task can be very lengthy. In addition, I recommend you actually choose several that you like and not get set on only one or two possibilities. The main reason for this is that many times are published and then not updated or supported. If a theme was released 2 years ago and has had no updates, it may not work well with the most recent versions of WordPress.
Where To Find Themes
One place is the official WordPress Theme Viewer. This tool has been around for a few years and contains over a thousand themes. You can search the Theme Viewer by browsing through every page of theme thumbnails. Or you can narrow your search by entering search criteria like “two column themes”, or “gray themes”. The main limitations I see with this tool are that you can not search by the themes publication date and you can not easily tell if a theme will work well with the latest version of WordPress. Still, it is a good place to start your search.
There is also a new, official repository that is just available at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/. This is very new and only has a few themes in it so far.
When you are looking for a theme, as you come across ones that you might like, I suggest the following approach. Because it can be difficult to find and go back to a theme you saw yesterday, make a Word document that you can save information on each theme that you like. At the very least make a list with each themes name and url.
Here are a couple more sites where you can browse themes.
http://www.wpthemesfree.com/index.php?order=added This link is to the list sorted by most recent themes first.
http://wprocks.com/demo/ On the sidebar look for the heading “Themes”. You can click to view each of the themes.
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