Eyeballs

Sep 4, 2008 Blog General, Wordpress

By nature, I am not a picky person. I have a tolerant palette for almost all food tastes. I’m fine if you are a half-hour late to meet me. I’ll let you pick the movie we’re going to watch or what game we play. I’ll have the everything Pizza as easily as a Veggie or all-Cheese pizza, whatever the rest of the group wants. In general, I’m very laid-back and I ease into the flow of life. I had to have a been a monk in my previous life (or a ninja. I really want to have been a ninja. Can please be a ninja reincarnate?).

But when it comes to WordPress themes, I’m a whole different being. I scrutinize EVERYTHING. The color scheme, the layout, the “extended options”, the fonts used, how many images load, what the sidebar is doing, where the navigation rests, how it handles subpages; basically whatever the template handles, I’m on top of it with a microscope.

To help you understand how anal I am about this: picking my children’s names was an easier task than picking a new template. I’ve spent months looking at new templates that can handle the latest version of Wordpress, and have been reluctant to upgrade to the 2.6.x series until I found the right visual vehicle that would allow me to do so. After all is said and done, I narrowed the choice down to three “free” themes. There were many paid themes that interested me, but I shied away from them because I could see myself changing my mind a couple of times after I paid for a theme and ultimately costing me a couple hundred of dollars.

The final choices for new wordpress themes were the following:

Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace is gorgeous! I love the natural and clean feel of the header, and the well organized sidebar. I still may end up switching to this theme.

Statement Theme

Statement Theme by BlogOhBlog is one that lets me start with a well executed and simple foundation. These type of themes work well for me since they immediately give a professional first-impression to anyone who visits your site, but also allow you to be flexible overtime and enhance with minor improvements or plugins.

DailyPress

The winner of my theme search was DailyPress (also by BlogOhBlog). Only one minor CSS change (the color of the href’s) and a new logo and I’m good to go! It’s clean, crisp, and not crowded by useless junk (of course, over time this will change). It also comes from a reputable enough source that I don’t mind leaving the footer links intact.

In the future, I do plan on experimenting with a couple of paid themes that I’ve found that I like more than the above. But for the time being, these three themes are high quality AND free. Thus they are perfect for my means.

This post is part of My Own 30 Day Challenge, Numero Dos

Tags: free wordpress templates, free wordpress themes, my own 30 day challenge 2, wordpess templates, Wordpress, wordpress themes