The Yellow Llama | Web Design South Africa

7 Wordpress themes that don’t suck

I couldn’t count the sites that claim to have the ‘best wordpress themes’ if I wanted to. There’s just too many. And most of them are crap. They’ve clearly been thrown together in a half-hour in a lame attempt to get some backlinking-footer action.

There are however, a few designers that actually put their back into it and have come up with some really impressive and innovative Wordpress Themes. These are from designers who’ve gone beyond the straightforward main content and sidebar structure of the original K2 theme. These are themes that make use of the more indepth Wordpress Features to make a unique theme that doesn’t have that templated/databased look.

In my travels, I’ve collected a bookmark folder of such high quality, worthwhile Wordpress themes. Here’s a list of 7 themes that you’d do well to use.

1) Digital Pop Wordpress Theme | Screenshot | Download
digital pop
A funky, highly customizable theme that is at least, pretty lively and allows for plenty of pictures and colorfullness.

2) Grid Focus | Screenshot | Download
grid
A clean and tidy theme that resembles a tightly clustered news type blog. With a bit of CSS knowledge you’d be able to add in a bit more color and of course a picture here and there.

3) Dark for Wordpress | Screenshot | Download
dark
Many blog readers will probably recognize this theme as being based on the previous site design of www.bartelme.at. He designed this beautiful theme and iLemoned made the coding work. It’s a stunning theme - almost calming.

4) Mimbo2 | Demo | Download
mimbo
With lots of dedicated content areas that allow for specific content seperation, this is a great theme for bloggers who want to focus on various industry specific topics. Plenty pictures thanks to the joys of Custom Fields allow you to further customize the look and feel of this awesome theme.

5) The Morning After | Screenshot | Download
morning after
I’ve actually used this theme myself, so I can speak from personal experience in that this theme is awesomely customizable and really well engineered. Custom Fields make it easy to tag certain posts with certain images and thumbnails. Aside and Featured categories allow you to nicely split up your content for various usages. A great theme.

6) Rainbow | Download
rainbow
This is a delightfully colorful theme and one of the few that make use of some nifty AJAX features. Thanks to the MooTools JS library, the Rainbow theme does some smooth scrolling which adds just that extra flair to this great design.

7) Revolution | Demo | Purchase
revolution
This is where the big guns come out. These guys have created such a high quality theme here. Ideal for a news/fashion/visual type blog site, this theme has all the angles covered and the developers have clearly gone to the enth degree to ensure that the theme is entirely flexible, styleable and customizable. For their efforts, they’re charging a fee for the download of this theme. From $59.95 (with footer links etc) to $249.95 for a developers license. A great option for web designers who could potentially build the cost of the theme into their quotation.

Be sure to check out these other resources for ‘OK’ Wordpress themes. Granted not all of these are as hot as the ones listed above, these are worth a mention.

5 Responses to 7 Wordpress themes that don’t suck

  • Written by: charles
  • Date: October 24th, 2007
  • Time: 12:22 pm

Ooh, very cool.. nice finds. These are slick.

[…] 7 Wordpress themes that don’t suck | The Yellow Llama - Web Design South Africa, Port Elizabeth We… (tags: wordpress WP themes) […]

  • Written by: Bruva J
  • Date: October 25th, 2007
  • Time: 8:48 am

Very cool, Revolution is my personal fav

Yea… I didn’t know about some of the others but Mimbo2 is a favorite. I use it on my site. I was actually going to go with The Morning After until I read about Mimbo2.

The Revolution looks really good. I could see purchasing it for a client.

  • Written by: Darren
  • Date: October 27th, 2007
  • Time: 12:04 am

Thanks for the mention! And glad you’re enjoying it, Hoodgrown.

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