After deciding to get back into blogging, I searched for, and evaluated numerous Wordpress themes. While there are many decent, widely-available free themes available, I opted to go with a premium theme. I was able to narrow my choices down to two themes: Omni, created by Bryan Hauer and Fresh News, created by Magnus Jepson and Adii.
Both are great themes, but I ended up selecting Fresh News because of its built-in flexibility and overall balance and cleanliness.
Per the theme’s web site:
Fresh News comes with 8 distinctly different, built-in colour schemes, which can be changed from your WordPress backend.
Additional colour schemes will be released in the future, and will be available free of charge.
Features
- Automatic Image Resizer (requires PHP GD Library to work)
- Custom Page Templates for Archives, Sitemap & Image Gallery
- Built-in Gravatar Support for Authors & Comments
- Author Profiles & Archives
- Featured news section
- Video Panel (for use with Flash videos)
- Traditional Blog Layout (for homepage)
- Integrated aside / sideblog section within the sidebar of the theme (optional)
- Navigation Dropdown Menu’s
- Sidebar Tabbed Box
- 2 different homepage layouts (featured section)
- Widgetized sidebars
- Integrated Banner Ad Management
- Integrated Flickr & Feedburner
In addition, you can switch between the default template and a blog template. Finally, I lucked out in that I came across the theme during a 2-for-1 promotion that is being offered until May 31st. I selected Livewire 2.0 by Mark Forrester and Adii as my second theme. I think I may migrate IWishICould.net over to Wordpress at some point in the near future, so this may be the perfect theme to use as the foundation.
May 29th, 2008 at 2:29 am
That’s awesome Ryan! Enjoy the theme(s)!