Last week the big news in the world of WordPress themes was Westwerk’s acquisition of Press75, one of the oldest theme shops originally founded by Jason Schuller in 2008. The folks at Westwerk began implementing changes immediately and announced new pricing options the same day the shop’s new owner was introduced. Single theme purchases are…
WordPress magazine themes are notorious for being packed to the gills with content, widgets, post meta, and advertising. Many have a chaotic feel as a byproduct of trying to pack as much content as possible into the homepage. Semicolon is a shining exception among free WordPress magazine themes in that it features a super minimalist…
May was an excellent month for free WordPress themes landing in the official Themes Directory. Several dozen were approved and added to the directory last week in one sweep. We’ve hand-picked some of the best themes released in the month of May, all of which have undergone the rigorous review process conducted by the Theme…
Tracks is a new free theme in the WordPress Themes Directory with a unique design that utilizes panoramic featured images. The homepage displays recent posts and a short excerpt for each, with big, bold images alternating down the page. If you’re looking for a simple theme with very few options to configure, then Tracks is…
For the past few years, the holy grail for many WordPress theme makers is to create a theme that is easy for anyone to customize without touching a line of code. One of the most difficult aspects of site customization is building the layout, especially if you’re shooting for a responsive website. Make is a…
Pictorico is a new free theme for self-hosted WordPress sites, created by the team at Automattic. While many themes in the WordPress Themes Directory lean toward the blog flavor, this one is geared toward portfolios and photoblogging websites. Pictorico is a single-column, grid-based theme that includes a post slider and looks its best with large…
Sami Keijonen, founder of Foxnet Themes, is not happy with his theme sales, which total $1400 since early 2013. His Kultalusikka theme is the sales leader, with just 15 purchases. Keijonen has one theme for sale on WordPress.com, which was added in March of this year and has so far netted him $147.64. In a…
Interface is a new business theme in the WordPress Themes Directory, created by Theme Horse, the same folks behind the popular Clean Retina and Attitude themes that have more than 80,000 downloads combined. If you need to set up a simple business site and you’re into the flat-style mint green design trend, then the new…
Yesterday, Twitter announced that it was rolling out the new profile redesign to all users. If you haven’t updated your Twitter profile, you can click on the “Get it Now” button on the new profiles product page. Last week we featured Ozh’ Tweet Archiver as an easy way to archive your tweets to WordPress. The…
If you love to blog but don’t want a theme with clunky sliders and overloaded widget areas cluttering up your site, then chances are you’re on the hunt for the perfect minimalist WordPress theme. Finding a theme that provides a beautiful reading experience with an unobtrusive, high quality design is no simple task. You’ll end…
Writing documentation for products is oftentimes a thankless task. It’s a challenge to style and organize docs in a clear and approachable way. Unfortunately this tends to be an afterthought for many projects, even though it is the first point of connection for users seeking support. A WordPress theme specifically created for documentation makes this…
Casper is a new theme for WordPress that is essentially a port of the default blogging theme for Ghost. Lacy Morrow built the theme using Underscores as a base. Morrow said that the goal for his theme was to approximate Ghost’s default theme while incorporating WordPress-specific features: The goal of this project is to emulate…
Most of the free WordPress themes out there are geared toward single-author blogs. It’s rare to find a decent option for magazines, because these types of themes take a little more effort to design and build, given the massive amount of content typically included on the homepage. JustWrite is a new magazine theme on WordPress.org…
Dazzling is a new free theme that landed in the WordPress Themes Directory last week. It’s based on Bootstrap 3, which makes it responsive and mobile friendly. The theme features an optional full-screen featured slider, which works well for customizing business or creative websites. If you’re a fan of flat design with mint green accent…
Last December, Jeff Chandler and I updated WP Tavern with a new design based on Theme Hybrid’s Stargazer theme. Stargazer takes a new approach to parent/child themes in that it houses the majority of both the design and functionality within the parent theme. The challenge is to make design changes in the child theme, without…