I’ve been spending way too much time trying out WordPress themes. Most have needed some tweaking, and very few meet my needs. I expect that my needs are not unique, but a lot of themes are really lacking in some important areas. This list tries to capture the accommodations my ideal theme would satisfy.
- Picture of myself/logo, prominent at top. Make use of “Header Image” feature. The only theme I found making use of this is Inanis.
- Honor fonts as specified. Don’t override everything and make my monospace look like everything else.
- Don’t override or ignore my favicon.
- Big, prominent RSS icon to encourage subscription.
- Ability to display categories/pages on some sort of toolbar.
- Hide comments section if comments are disabled for the page/post.
- Tagline near the title.
- Whitespace is nice, but don’t overdo it with zealous line spacing.
- I don’t need three different locations for ads. How about no ads?
- No superfluous pseudo-widgets. If I didn’t add a widget, please don’t do it for me.
- No custom boxes. They’re a nuisance. Just make use of the standard widgets.
- Make your preview picture look at least a little bit like the real thing.
- jQuery is nice for improving the UI/UX.
Of the hundreds (thousands?) of themes I looked at, ~50 of them looked worth trying out. Of those 50, these are the best free themes I found that came close to satisfying my list:
If you’re a mere theme shopper, I hope this helps you spend less time than I did searching for a sane theme. Have fun tweaking!
If you’re a theme designer (or will be soon), please consider the list, and add any major omissions and personal pet peeves in a comment.