Selecting a theme is a dangerous proposition, at least it is for me 
. Themes are fun! Addicting and time consuming.
There are so many to choose from Free Themes, Premium Themes, Bulk Themes… This week we are going to take a closer took at Free Themes, where to find them, what to look for and what to consider.
First things first… Free Themes are fun – looking at all the options, the creativity of designers and incredible array of features. And even better, they are everywhere, you would be hard pressed to not find something that would work for you. The best place to start is to look at WordPress itself: http://wordpress.com/extend/themes, here you probably could find just about anything you might need.
If you go to Google and type in the keywords “free WordPress Themes”:
About 66,200,000 results (0.20 seconds). That should do it don’t you think?
If you are new to WordPress, just learning and getting comfortable with using it. And especially if your budget is tight and not a ton of $$ to invest, a Free Theme is a great way to get started.
Having said all that, there are definitely things to be aware of.
1) Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth – There are some wonderful themes out there… but there are also many that are, well, junk. Take a few minutes and do some research. Google the name of the theme, see if there are any comments about it. Definitely go to the WordPress Support Forums and do a search on the name, see what others have encountered, good and bad.
2) Be prepared – You may run into trouble and free themes do not normally come with support. Hopefully you won’t run into an issue but you just never know.
3) Code can be messy – In my journey getting to know WordPress I have come to greatly appreciate the value of Beautiful Code… there have been many times, when helping a client, I have run into some of the most ugly, messy, disorganized code possible. Which can take a lot more time for someone like me to figure out what is going on and find possible fixes.
Generally (and of course there are always exceptions) the more organized the code the better luck you will probably have.
4) Customizing… maybe - The great thing about Free Themes is that with all the options out there you probably can have something that is ready “out of the box”, but in the chance that you need to change a logo, change a color etc. see if you can find out about the customization options.
5) WordPress 3.01 - With the newest release of WordPress, there are quite a few free themes, which do not come with support are not 3.0 compatible, make sure to double check this important point as well.
Here are some additional resources you might want to check out:
Theme Forest: By Envato offers a free theme each month, there have been some cool ones too!
I’m a huge StudioPress, Brian Gardner fan and my top recommendation. He has some great free themes and are how I got started. Here is a list of quite a few of them http://www.eblogtemplates.com/author/bgardner/
Chris Pearson of DIY – Thesis Theme also has a collection of early themes that are great to work with – http://www.pearsonified.com/themes (scroll to the bottom)
