Before We Begin…

If you just want to get straight onto the list, feel free to skip the following.

*Assumes a defensive stance*

I’ll address the elephant in the room before we begin. In recent months I have occasionally taken it upon myself to produce lists. Two lists in particular – the WPMU 100 and the Top 100 WordPress Plugins. I produce them because they are the kind of lists that I would like to see. Since I am an avid WordPress enthusiast, I figure that others may well like to see them too.

For the most part, feedback from these lists has been very positive. People are delighted to find a resource that consolidates most of the best options into one place. I will be the first to admit that things are missed – no list is perfect. But it isn’t about producing a perfect list – it’s about producing a useful one.

Constructive criticism and suggestions as to themes that you think deserve to be on the following list are heartily welcomed in the comments section. If you are tempted to simply state that the list is terrible and offer no recommendations for its improvement, please take your opinion elsewhere.

Ranking Criteria

Right! With that out of the way, let’s get on with the subject of today’s post – the top 50 WordPress themes for your site. If you have no interest in understanding how the themes have been ranked, feel free to skip straight to the list.

Compiling this list presented its own unique set of challenges. First of all, compatibility was a priority. I decided to only include themes that have been released or updated since 4th July 2011 – which was the day that WordPress 3.2 was released. Whilst this isn’t a perfect solution, this step should ensure that the themes on offer are compatible with the current version of WordPress.

The alternative solution – installing each of the 50 themes and putting them through full testing – would have taken an enormous amount of time. If you believe that any of the themes on offer incompatible with the WordPress 3.3, please let me know.

There were two other issues that I faced. Firstly, there simply aren’t as many themes available as there are plugins. Secondly, people apparently aren’t all that generous in their propensity to actually rate the themes they download.

Having obtained a full list of all themes available in the WordPress themes directory (thanks to a tame WPMU DEV genius – thanks Ve!), it became clear that a top 100 list would be impractical – whilst a huge number of themes have been released since 4th July 2011, the number of ratings per theme was down to around 10 by the time you got to the 50th most rated. In my opinion, any lesser number of ratings would possibly produce some undesirable results, so I decided to keep the list to 50.

Given the low number of ratings, I had to give some thought as to how to rank the themes. In the end I decided to place a far higher weighting to the number of ratings. Whilst a high star rating is certainly taken into account, a higher number of ratings is seen as far more valuable. I think this accurately reflects the quality of a theme – getting a small number of 5 star ratings is easily done, but getting a higher number of ratings is a little more challenging.

The List

Here it is folks – the top 50 free WordPress themes for your site. As I mentioned earlier, please feel free to add your comments, suggestions and constructive criticism in the comments section. Enjoy!

Tom Ewer on Google+

Essentially on the 24th April, the Goog rolled out an update named Penguin, with the intended function being to penalize sites that:

• Engage in ‘keyword stuffing’
• Participate in ‘link schemes’
• And are generally of low quality

And while usually this would result in much rejoicing as purveyors of fine content, such as ourselves, watch the spammy copycat / autoposted to / RSS sucking uselessness disappear out of the results (as it did, to a degree, as a result of last years Panda update)… this time round it wasn’t quite the same.

For, ahem, example, take a look at what happened to the google referrals to this very site:

The word is "ouch"

Yep, that’s right - Monday 23rd April saw 8,580 visits from Google. Monday 30th saw 1,527.

Holy. Crap.

But, since we are not involved in any keyword stuffing (well, Tom does sometimes use a few tags, but really, come on ;), link schemes (although I get multiple emails about them every single day), or poor quality content… why did this happen?

Well, fortunately we were able to ask Matt Cutts!

Oh, ok, not directly, but we reached out to the largest news site down under (the SMH), who interviewed him and asked him what the problem was specifically with wpmu.org. We may or may not appear in an article shortly… I’m hoping may.

He gave them three links, copy and paste the below:

• http://baydownloads.info/11580-Wordpress-Membership-Plugin-Wordpress-PayPal-R-Plugin-show-5starserve.htm – a site pirating our software, presumably linking to us for credibility
• http://computerofficechair.blogdetik.com/category/tak-berkategori/ – a splog, using an old version of the Farms theme pack (which did have a link to wpmu.org in the footer)
• http://computerchairs.blogdetik.com/ (the same splog)

And said that we should consider the fact that we were possibly damaged by the removal of credit from links such as these.

My thoughts on that are, in a nutshell… arse!

We’re a massively established news source that’s been running since March 2008, picking up over 10,400+ Facebook likes, 15,600+ Twitter followers and – to cap it all 2,537 +1s and 4,276 FeedBurner subscribers – as measured by Google!

How could a bunch of incredibly low quality, spammy, rubbish (I mean a .info site… please!) footer links have made that much of a difference to a site of our size, content and reputation, unless Google has been absolutely, utterly inept for the last 4 years (and I doubt that that’s the case).

And then there’s the fact to consider that have…

• NO keyword stuffing
• NO links schemes
• NO quality issues

So, how did this happen?

It’s clearly down to being punished for distributing WordPress Themes!

Here’s how it works:

1. You create and release a really great WordPress theme, for free
2. Some spammer decides to use it on their sploggy / nasty / low quality / keyword stuffed pages
3. YOU get penalized because of that

Given that we were the folks who outed the dangers of searching for free WP themes in terms of the danger they could pose to your site, especially even in Google’s eyes, the irony is not lost on me.

And I’d be willing to bet an extremely large amount of money that a great number of WordPress Theme developers, even if they haven’t been rolling out themes in the last 3 or 4 years, have been hit just the same (or a heap worse!).

So, what can you do if you’ve been affected? And what are we gonna do?

Well, first up give up 11 minutes of your life to watch the always excellent Rand Fishkin explain how Penguin has worked, and what folk might be able to do.

Then, consider doing the following (it’s pretty much what we’re going to have to do :/):

1. Find the spammiest and nastiest sites using your themes and beg / offer to pay them to remove the attribution
2. Remove or rel=nofollow every attribution link you ever put in anything you release, do that now
3. Look around your own sites and remove any links that aren’t 100% branded (and by that I mean a link to WPMU.org should read ‘WPMU.org’ or ‘WPMU’)
4. And then, and this bit makes me feel kinda sick as we’ve never done it, go out and engage in what your non-penalized competition is doing… namely ‘legitimate’ link building (want a guest post from me, look forward to the email, ugh ;)
5. And last, but not least, add in non-branded, keyword-rich, links to all your competitors sites and include them in your free releases… should serve you a treat!

Well, OK, obviously we’re not going to do the last one, but clearly any malicious SOAB could do that, in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s happening right now :/

And who knows if you’re gonna be the victim, or what you could possibly do about it.

Image credit for the arse UmNET, for the angry Penguin Real Science

James Farmer on Google+

1. What inspired you to create ThemePivot?

It was inspired by a couple of things actually.

I run a digital agency and we have built a few WordPress sites for clients. Sometimes after a project has been finished clients come back wanting small things changed. Often the changes are fairly trivial but the admin cost in doing it is really high – like finding their server details, getting into the codebase and then invoicing them some tiny amount of money. It’s almost not worth the job – and ideally I could pass that onto someone who was setup to process a lot of these kinds of jobs quickly and effectively.

I’ve also used a few premium WordPress themes in the past. The thing that has bugged me about this is trying to find a theme that suits my needs – you end up spending a lot of timing going through thousands of themes to find the one that is just right. With ThemePivot I can choose one which is almost right and then get it customised cheaply and easily.

2. Will ThemePivot focus only on theme customization or will you be open to requests for plugin customization as well?

ThemePivot can customise pretty much everything about your WordPress site from the theme itself, custom plugins through to changes to your database. The only thing we’re not looking to do is creating complete themes from scratch like .psd to HTML conversions – we’ll leave that kind of work to the thousands of sites already doing that work.

3. How does the “Create Pivot” function work?

When you create a pivot you give us a brief of the things you want to tweak on your website. This goes to our marketplace of professional WordPress developers.

Developers then break your job down into a series of tasks with each task being $50. This creates a fixed point for you to be able to compare different developers – so you can get an understanding of how well they understand your project.

Once you’ve agreed on a set of tasks to be completed the developer gets to work on your site.

4. Is there an option to make pivots private for members of the site only?

This is in our development roadmap but it’s not a priority at the minute. However if you’re interested in posting a project to ThemePivot but need it to be private send me an email and I’ll make it happen for you.

To learn more, visit http://www.themepivot.com/ and sign up to be notified when it launches.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Caputo is currently offering his Modest Theme on the site as the first deal. You can view the features and the live demo and elect how much you’d like to pay:

So what’s going on here with the themes? How does ThemeThrift work?

Caputo has set up the site as an experiment and we’re interested to see how it goes.

What happens to the theme afterwards is up to the developer; Some will sell them on theme marketplaces, others will retire them forever, and some might put their theme in a car and push it off a cliff, creating a fiery inferno of twisted metal and code.

Intrigued? Sign up at ThemeThrift to be make sure you get notified when new deals are available.

So what are your thoughts? Is this a WordPress theme graveyard or an exciting new experiment?

Sarah Gooding on Google+

All of the themes utilize the UpThemes Framework options panel for easy customization. This panel gives you the ability to upload a logo, add a Nivo slider, add social media accounts, customize typography, and even export your options to another site.

The pricing structure is very simple: $49 for a single theme or $99 per year for the Developer Club, which includes all current themes. ThemeFurnace aims to deliver at least one new theme to its collection every month.

Like what you see at ThemeFurnace? They’ve launched an affiliate program for you to get in on, which currently pays a generous 30% commission on every theme and developer club membership sold. Stop by the new ThemeFurnace shop to check out their “Red Hot WordPress Themes”.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

StrapPress: WordPress + Twitter Bootstrap

StrapPress is a new responsive WordPress theme that aims to deliver all of this and more. It’s a professionally-supported theme that ships with all the Twitter Bootstrap goodies packed in. Built with tons of easy-to-use features for your average WordPress user, StrapPress incorporates everything you get with Twitter Bootstrap but with a focus on presentation and usability for WordPress.

StrapPress features:

• Two different homepage layouts with widget areas
• Twelve different page templates including a contact form and sitemap
• A theme options page to easily change styles, layouts, and content without having to look at any code
• Lightbox functionality automatically added to images and video inserted into pages/post
• Gallery template that is fully customizable with different layouts and styles
• Eight widget areas on varies page templates
• Social icons easily added to the header, footer, or both

All of the HTML and JS Bootstrap elements have been conveniently placed within WordPress shortcodes for ease of use. You’ve got built-in shortcodes available for typography, code, blockquotes, tables, buttons, icons, tabs, labels, alerts, tooltips, popovers, progress bars and more!

The buttons come in all kinds of styles, sizes, and functionality:

Alerts are nicely-styled and ready to use via a shortcode:

StrapPress even includes a shortcode for creating a simple carousel:

Galleries within StrapPress are slick, responsive and easily-sortable:

These are just a few of the features you can implement on your site in a matter of seconds via the StrapPress shortcodes. As you can see, it’s packaged with lots of fantastically easy-to-use UI elements for quickly creating and customizing your own WordPress site. StrapPress is available for $35, which includes professional support. Check out a live demo of StrapPress to see it in action.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

My Restaurant Theme is the most impressive product of its type that I have come across in some time. The name gives away its purpose – to sell food. So if a simple demo site gets me salivating, they must be doing something right.

The theme was clearly built with WordPress beginners in mind – featuring a highly intuitive and easily manageable back end CMS. But that does not mean that the front end appearance suffers – far from it.

Let’s take a closer look at this impressive theme and see what it has to offer.

Skins

Not potato skins – theme skins (har har). My Restaurant Theme offers up four different skins from which to choose:

• Classic
• Modern
• Country
• Asian

Although they are labelled as different themes on the interface, these truly are skins in the sense that they do not offer any drastic changes to the design. We’re talking mainly about font changes and some graphical tweaks.

The Asian "Theme"

To be perfectly honest, it would appear that the theme’s developers spent far more time on the Classic design than any other – the rest look a little rough around the edges (as you can see from the screenshot above). However, the classic design is excellent.

Slider

Ah yes – the ubiquitous slider. Love it or hate it, but it makes more sense to use it as part of a restaurant website’s design than many other applications.

Setting up your slides couldn’t be any easier – as with most functions on the back end, the process is broken down into simple steps:

The customization settings are pretty comprehensive too. All the usual suspects are there – height, transition effect, animation speed, and pause time. And if you want to do away with it altogether, that is possible with the click of a button.

The Menu

When it comes to a restaurant theme, the ease with which you can create and manage your online menu is perhaps the key element. Fortunately, My Restaurant Theme does not disappoint.

Entering a food item is much like creating a blog post, but with additional meta data including:

• Food type (e.g. vegetarian, spicy, etc.)
• Price
• Calories

All menu items are categorized by type (e.g. starter). Those categorizations are then used when you set up your Menu Cards, which allow you to provide some introductory text for each food type and then list all relevant menu items below. This is done with a simple drag and drop system:

The Menu Cards and food items integrate seamlessly on the front end:

Finally, each menu item features an “Add To Cart” button – the theme has a fully featured home delivery system.

Reservations

The ability to book reservations is a must for any restaurant website, and My Restaurant Theme does not disappoint, with a beautiful reservations page design:

Once a reservation is submitted, both the customer and the restaurant are informed of the booking. Although a default template email is supplied, you can have full control over the contents.

A small reservation widget can also be included anywhere in the site by including a simple shortcode.

Coupons

In case you hadn’t noticed, social media has become a part of life for many people now, and promotion via social media networks can be of great benefit to a restaurant.

My Restaurant Theme recognizes this and places social sharing buttons at strategic points throughout the website, such as the coupons section:

As you would probably expect by now, setting up these coupons is a piece of cake, and can do their part in boosting your restaurant’s social media exposure.

Other Features

My Restaurant Theme offers up even more features, such as Events promotion, various custom shortcodes, and of course a blog template.

As you would expect from a theme of this calibre, it is fully responsive, but I would have liked to see the developers spend a little bit more time on making the mobile design more attractive:

The theme’s developers clearly recognize the importance of mobile browsing (to a restaurant site especially), but it just doesn’t quite deliver. They claim that 50% of mobile local business searches are seeking contact information, and yet you have to scroll down to find a telephone number and address on the mobile theme. It needs more work, both to be more attractive and more functional.

A Fine Option

But overall, I am extremely impressed by this theme. Whilst I may have some gripes over the mobile theme and poor skin options, the package as a whole is well worth the money (and could be a dream solution for many technologically challenged restaurant owners).

My Restaurant Theme is reasonably priced at $149 for the theme alone. Alternatively, you can go for a hosted option at $34 per month.

Find out more here.

Tom Ewer on Google+

Adapt boasts a clean, minimal layout. Best of all, it’s 100% GPL and free to use for both personal and commercial projects.

The theme also features:

• Fully Responsive layout
• Homepage Slider – unlimited heights (just upload the image size you want)
• Portfolio Slider
• Filterable portfolio template
• Full-width & landing page templates
• Blog page template
• Threaded comments
• Widgetized sidebar and footer

Adapt is also an excellent theme choice for freelancers who need a quick way to showcase a portfolio. Adapt’s filterable portfolio page template allows you to easily sort and display portfolio items by category.

Check out a live demo of Adapt and resize your browser window to simulate how it will respond to devices. You can also scan the QR-Code on the theme’s info page to checkout it out on your mobile device.

Download Adapt for free from the WP Explorer website. If you like the Adapt theme, make sure to check out WP Explorer’s other free themes and their premium themes for more high quality designs.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Neni Features:

• Responsive design (HTML5 & CSS3)
• Custom colors and custom background
• Two-columns and full-width-template
• Archive template
• Right-sidebar
• Threaded-comments
• Custom-menu (3 levels)
• Browser: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE 8 & 9

Check out a live demo of the theme on its homepage at pixxels.at.

Since Neni is listed with the WordPress Theme Directory, you know that it meets WordPress coding standards set by the WordPress Theme Review team and is safe to use on your site. Download Neni for free and get started customizing your blog.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Remember the old days of Twitter? The options and appearance of PulsePress are meant to mimic the old twitter user interface and enable micro-discussion. Check out a screenshot:

Theme Homepage | View Demo

Download PulsePress for free from the WordPress Theme Directory.

Sarah Gooding on Google+