Best Wordpress Themes

Finding the best Wordpress themes just got a whole lot easier. This constantly updated resource lists the web's current best Wordpress themes based on usability, look & feel, customization and universality. Enjoy!

This stunning magazine theme gives your Wordpress site some serious credibility as an online magazine, news or review site. Its strength lies in highlighting your site's categories in a numerous amount of ways (see the demo). Custom thumbnails and "fold out" flags create big eye appeal!

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A clean-cut magazine layout Wordpress theme that was made for news sites, but can be modified for affiliate sites as well. Image thumbs make navigation super easy for your visitors...all images link to their own dedicated page with content that you can add. Plenty of white space!

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Transform Wordpress into a very legitimate online magazine, or even a well structured affiliate store, with Streamline Theme. A featured article box sifts through pages that you specify in the back-end, and there's plenty of room for your AdSense ads and affiliate banners.

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A sleek and well-designed magazine theme whose attractive layout is reminiscent of reading a newspaper. Featured posts on the home page draw a great deal of attention to headlines, each of which lead your viewers to a content-heavy inner page that has multiple advertising areas.

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Structured to make articles easy to find, your 'News', 'Feature' & 'Preview' articles are laid out uniquely on the front page for that real 'magazine theme' feel. There's plenty of room for your ad banners & boxes. This beautiful layout makes for a cost-effective light magazine site.

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A stunning, completely free 2 column design Wordpress theme with featured & regular post templates, a jQuery widgetized "slider" in the footer, and 8 different color schemes and backgrounds. Metamorphosis Theme is fully customizable through an amazing backend admin panel.

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Morning After has a magazine-style layout with a 3-column home page. Easily assign thumbnails to posts through the admin panel, and run a neat looking blog or mini-magazine with this free theme. Some tweaking is necessary to get it to function as-is, be sure to read the documentation!

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A clean, well-layed out magazine theme with easy-to-read text, and an orderly CSS stylesheet that will save any designer lots of time. Showcase your current top articles on the left, assign thumbnails to posts and make your article site pull in an income with various ad placement spots.

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A clean newspaper design with noteworthy options including multiple ad spots for ad or affiliate boxes, multiple page & post templates, and a professional typography. Integrated sliders and image thumbnails give a professional-grade appearance.

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A beautiful theme with an amazing front page layout where everything just seems to fit perfectly. Lots of space for articles AND ads make it both attractive and effective. There's even a perfect spot set out for a skyscraper ad on the right side. This theme has been around for awhile.

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A beautiful mix of design and usability: The Corporation sets up an instant business website showcasing your products and services, all "within the fold" of a computer screen. You'll also be able to maintain a corporate blog, with updates prominent on your home page.

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Simple yet stunning, this theme is most suitable for a small business website. A sliding call-out box on the front page features specific areas of your site, with three additional attention-grabbing boxes underneath. Pages look clean with plenty of white space. Great menu effects.

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A business theme made for showcasing products: It's a clean looking blog. It's a portfolio. This lightweight theme encourages you to maintain a minimalistic, effective small business website that is very easy to navigate and is extremely easy on the eyes and simple to navigate.

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Showcasing a small business or a single product? Look toward this theme to provide a clear "path to conversion": Delegate Theme is sleek and very web 2.0 with the sole purpose of driving your visitors toward a clear, short path. A great theme to consider for selling a single affiliate or dropshipped product.

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Another beautiful product spotlight theme for Wordpress. "Inspire" uses jQuery coding to present beautiful front-page transitions: highlight a single product, a video, or whatever you want. Each element can include text and a "read more" button. Navigate visitors to a "Buy Now" page!

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Productum Theme was designed to help you showcase item(s) for sale by presenting them the instant a visitor comes onto your site. Two "call to action" buttons on the front page splash screen funnel your visitors toward a landing page of your choosing.

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Got a small business or LLC? Use Vibrant CMS Theme for your company site! A transitioning 'hero box' on the home page guides your visitors down a path to a conversion point. The theme comes with 20 (yes, 20) amazing color combos, all included. This theme is a great way to get a site up quickly.

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A stunning blog layout that's minimalistic with beautiful typography. Memoir works for any personal blog, and comes with several page templates and a ton of shortcodes for the quick creation of buttons, tabs, call-out boxes, image sliders, text sliders & more.

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A grungy, notebook-fashioned personal blog theme that comes available with 6 different color accents: Deviant is suited more for the individual blogger than for a business blog. It's organized to make your articles simple to find, with a clutter-free side bar.

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Touting itself as "54 themes in 1 package," Anytime Theme comes with an unbelievable 54 color schemes, 22 XHTML pages, all original .PSD files for you Photoshoppers, and customizable backend coding. This premium Wordpress theme is for anyone who seeks a minimalist web 2.0 blog.

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This is the only theme that matters if you're looking to start an AdSense ready site with Wordpress: Designed specifically for PPC ad placement, everything is compact and easy to navigate through with heavy emphasis on pure content. Use this theme for your niche blogging venture.

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Awesomely artistic theme! Notepad Chaos has tons of eye appeal.It's strictly a blog theme: use it for your personal website/blog only, since that's what it was built for. A plain and simple content layout includes recent posts highlighted for your viewers in this too-cool grunge blog theme.

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A great choice for any light magazine or blog site. The focus is all about text, and not so much about images. Make it be a selection for your AdSense-driven article site, content-rich blog, or just about anything else you can hack it up into.

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Illacrimo is a beautiful blog theme for Wordpress, featuring a two right-column design sorting out your site's categories and inner links. This is strictly a blog theme, and it's doubtful that it could serve any other purpose; however, it's a beautiful one at that.

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A crisp looking theme that optimizes white space with great color schemes and overall site design. This is your classic small business website design, featuring your business' three main competencies on the front page, followed by your new updates.

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It looks like Mac OS, giving it obvious eye appeal to anyone with a Mac fetish. It certainly makes a great Wordpress-fueled blog, although it's not exactly designed for multimedia or images. Customize the side bar via drag & drop. iTheme requires a footer backlink pointing back to the designer's site.

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Got a photo sharing or display site in mind? Aperture was built to handle turning Wordpress into a very classy web 2.0-style picture or gallery site. Its beautiful layout will stun first-time visitors with jQuery sliding images, and pages encouraging more visits with similar images.

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It's a gallery theme with a twist: your posts look like pieces of paper on a desktop. Expand or contract your browser window, and they "sift" back into a re-sized grid -- a cool effect. This is an ideal theme for a personal portfolio or project site. Lots of eye candy, and fun to use!

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Object Theme has a two-fold purpose: it can be either turn Wordpress into a video gallery or a photo gallery. As you'll see in the demo, whatever gallery you're presenting has center stage: the homepage has oversized thumbs of your videos or images. Includes 14 color schemes.

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Ideal for web designers or any kind of artist or photographer, Sophisticated Folio is a gorgeous Wordpress theme that will set up your portfolio in a presentable, highly professional way. Just wait until you see the deep pages in this theme's demo: each page showcases your images in lightbox fashion.

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This is probably one of the most talked-about themes you'll come across - it received wide enough recognition to be used for websites built by companies like eBay, Affiliate Summit and Credit.com. There's probably no other theme more expendable than Thesis.

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Offering dozens of site combinations, WP-Remix turns Wordpress into a true CMS. Mold, shape, add, subtract and do just about anything to achieve the ultimate website layout you want with its complex yet easy-to-use admin panel. It's truly the "Swiss Army Knife" of Wordpress themes!

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Everything you could ask for (and more) for a Wordpress Classifieds posting site. Set your own pricing tiers for classified posts, add unlimited fields, categories, blog posts & more, accept multiple currency types...it's insane to know how much detail was crammed into ClassiPress!

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An out-of-box solution for creating a classified ads site where you earn 100% of the profit of what your users pay to post an ad. Configure payment plans, set time limits, offer higher fees for promoted items and more with this feature-packed theme. It even categories items by geo-location.

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If you've ever had aspirations of creating your own "yellow pages" site, this theme will help you achieve it. Allowing for either free or paid content submission (or both), you can run a geo-targeted business listings Wordpress site with a host of on-site social features.

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Create a store that's not only total eye candy, but effective: includes product photos, user & editor ratings, a "related products" feature under each item, and a great shopping cart system. No clutter or mess - just beautiful design and usability.

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This premium theme creates an elegant and fashionable storefront, presenting its items in a visually appealing way: its background "shifts" as you click featured items, and each item has a full details page with related items and a fully integrated shopping cart system.

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Sometimes, you'll need a website that just promotes one product -- and that's what My Product theme does. Showcase that one item you're selling in this attractive theme that funnels customers toward a "buy now" or "join today" page. Also great for AdWords landing pages.

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Wordpress has quickly become the most versatile blogging software platform. It's free, you can install it on your own server, and use your own URL. Best yet are the themes that transform it from a blog into anything that a CMS can do.

Wordpress.com is the site that hosts a Wordpress blog for you. Pros: Nothing to download, a server account isn't needed. Cons: restricted customization, very little expandability.

Wordpress.org is the site where you can download Wordpress software and run it on your server. You'll have total control over the look and feel of your blog using this method. Pros: 100% design/control over your blog, ability to use a URL for your blog. Cons: You need a hosting account and a domain name. Is that really a "con," anyway?

Wordpress MU or "Multi User" was a sub-project of Wordpress.org. It's the same exact software, re-structured to allow your visitors to create their own blogs within your blog - turning Wordpress into a massive, unlimited social networking site. Wordpress MU is now actually a part of Wordpress.org, and is no longer a separate download!

1) Free Themes vs. Premium Themes: This might already be obvious, but there's almost always a reason why free Wordpress themes are free: they are typically abandoned and tend to go un-supported within a year or two of their creation. Premium themes, however, are taken seriously by their developers. Their cost usually includes a lifetime of free theme upgrades. You'll NEED that.

2) Shortcodes: A newer inclusion in Wordpress. Shortcodes are basically quick ways for you to insert common elements in a page that would normally take more time and effort to create in your style.css file. They usually include "warning" boxes, icon bullets, drop-caps and other things that take time to code. Thanks to shortcodes, all you'll have to do is type something like [warningbox] in a page, and the warning box will appear. The codes vary and depend on what your theme designer has included in your Wordpress theme.

3) Grid: Yet another new feature seen in today's Wordpress themes is a "grid" layout. This most likely refers to the 960 grid, which is becoming more commonly seen as integrated with today's themes. It allows you to create two, three, four (or way more) column layouts within the body area of a Wordpress post or page.

4) Widgets: You'll thank yourself for getting a fully widgetized Wordpress theme, because it's awfully annoying to have to code it yourself on a theme that doesn't have many widgets. In case you didn't know, widgets are areas reserved on your website (typically the sidebar(s) and footer) where you can drop in code, text or applets and have them appear instantly, rather than having to hard-code these things in by hand.

5) New WP Menus: One of the newer features of this next-generation version of Wordpress are menus that finally work the way we all wanted them to. Now baked in to today's Wordpress version, you can custom tweak exactly what makes it into your top menu (and what doesn't), down to the page! You can even change the order with simple drag-and-drop. However, your theme must have been made to accommodate new menus. Generally, any theme supporting Wordpress 3.0+ has this feature already.

Don't Forget Support! Personally, I wouldn't buy a theme from a designer who never responds to comments or updates their theme. Everything about your theme should be about the future, and what happens to it when new versions of Wordpress are released! The worst case scenario is to have a broken theme and no support from the designer.