Two weeks ago, we asked to hear about your favorite WordPress themes. We had over 125 responses, but even with such a variety of responses, only 5 came out as the clear favorites. Without further delay, here are your top 5 themes.
Swift is the fastest loading, SEO optimized, server friendly WordPress theme. This theme is mainly for blogs running on low server resources and for those who like clean and simple designs. [directory listing]
Hybrid is a user-friendly, search-engine optimized theme framework, featuring 15 custom page templates and 8 widget-ready areas, allowing you to create any type of site you want. [directory listing]
Twenty Ten is stylish, customizable, simple, and readable — make it yours with a custom menu, header image, and background. Twenty Ten supports six widgetized areas (two in the sidebar, four in the footer) and featured images (thumbnails for gallery posts and custom header images for posts and pages). [directory listing]
Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it. It’s perfect for beginner bloggers and WordPress development professionals. [directory listing]
Suffusion is an elegant, versatile and browser-safe theme with a power-packed set of options. It has 19 widget areas, one-column, two-column and three-column fixed-width and flexible-width formats, 10 pre-defined templates, 17 pre-defined color schemes, two customizable multi-level drop-down menus, featured posts, a magazine layout, tabbed sidebars, widgets for Twitter, Social Networks and Google Translator. [directory listing]
I’m sure that most of you weren’t surprised by a few of these, but maybe you discovered one that you just might try today. If you find yourself always relaying on a particular theme, find the developer’s donation page and at least buy them a drink.
i am using google chrome wordpress themes.
want to replace with new. but, i am lazy to optimizing the new themes. :p
The problem with the ‘herd’ listing is that most of the wordpress users are not that conversant with technical aspects – it is happy with theme authors who give user interfaces and give answers on easy how to questions. That does not necessarily mean that the themes are “Top Theme”. It only means that the vocal of the herd has spoken louder than others.
Automattic themes being a definite exception – technically much superior than others.
functionality and quality let aside, none of them really looks appealing to me.
Don’t knock them until you’ve tried them. 🙂
Despite their initial appearance, these are some of the most functional and customizable WordPress themes available today.
Twenty Ten is the only one I’ve ever used, wanna see the others on the list, thanks!
Great themes. I’ve already used Hybrid, it’s pretty nice and simple.
Really i admit the functionality but we should not forget the appearance.
However Thank you for the exerted efforts.
I really like the Hybrid theme, it’s simple looking yet easy to navigate.
I tested it on one of my newly created travel blog, and loving it:)
Eric Carlson
Publisher, watch tv on my computer
These top 5 are the top five for a reason. Beautifully designed. I think you need to customize them a great deal so that they are entirely unique however. There are literally thousands of blogs with the same design.
Like Anup said, a lot of user like me are not very technical, having a simple theme which is fairly good looking and good support is very important. Hybrid and Swift has lots of user and its easy to ask for help.
a theme isn’t a theme to me without brothercake’s drag and drop javascript….or an alternatively coded sidebar item dragger.. I don’t care how pretty the theme is, without draggable sidebar items the theme is crap to me. hahaha
I did mention this on the original thread soliciting inputs – from the list above Suffusion theme gives you that capability, though according to the developer (who regrets providing this capability) it is deliberately set up as an opt-in: the docking boxes script is around 50kb in size, hence a significant addition to your page. Nonetheless you can enable it in your theme options.
i have been used swift, they have complete configuration at they theme option. deserve at number one at this list.
Never heard of Swift and Suffusion. I must be out of the loop. How hard is Twenty Ten to customize?
Twenty Ten is actually one of the easiest themes to customize, if you know your way around the code. The code is actually thoroughly documented within the files themselves. Otherwise, 2010 Weaver is a great alternative.
Thanks for the smokin’ fast reply James. Loved the post. I currently use Thesis and like it but next design I’m thinking about building my own.