With more than a dozen of operational and experimental websites in our group, how do we manage to upgrade the websites’ designs?
These days when most of our websites are on the WordPress platform, we avail of themes that are available in the market. Some are premium themes (meaning we paid for the license to use them) and some are free themes, meaning, themes governed by licensing protocols which allow us to use the themes in whatever way we want as long as we give attribution to the sourced web designers and we don’t sell the themes ourselves.
Given also the fast pace WordPress is upgrading, the demand of economics prevails. Like other web publishing groups, we need to look somewhere where we can obtain free themes which meet our requirements. Our operating philosophy is to leave the design part to designers, and we focus on our content, on our members and on our clients.
Here are samples of our websites using free WordPress themes and their sources. In some instances like with this site, we use the themes’ framework and coding only. In some cases we used the theme “straight from the box” with very slight modification.
Only in the Philippines uses the Gossip City theme BlakMagik theme with slight modification by BizzArtic’ s Isotherm theme.Design Disease Productive Dreams.
emanilapoetry.com is using a modified version of Revolution Lifestyle by Brian Gardner Thesis by Chris Pearson.
Philippine Studies is using a modified version of Cutline by Chris Pearson Sample Child by Brian Gardner / Studio Press.
PinoyKomiks.net is using Unstandard theme by Derek Punsalan Woothemes’ Bueno theme.
For now, this site is using Chris Pearson’s Copyblogger Genesis Framework with a Sample Child theme. From time to time, we re-skin this blog to test other themes for clients and friends.
Yes, I know there are other web design sites (not listed here) which offer equally well-designed free themes, but I particularly don’t like to use themes with encrypted footers with links to sites promoting products or services totally irrelevant to my audience. And there are a lot of them out there.
Like what I am doing now, I don’t mind linking to products or services I am comfortable with in exchange for using a free theme.
Perhaps you know of other web design sites which offer free WordPress themes?
Share with us their details. Add them via comments in the following format:
Name of Theme: Sharing
Theme page: http://www.romeocayabyab.com/free-wordpress-themes/
Type of Theme: 2 Column, personal blog
Backlinks? Not required, but would of course be appreciated.
I was planning to include in this page a list of other free WordPress themes which I consider worth looking at. These are well designed, and many of them I have tested as XHTML valid.
But for lack of space, we positioned copies of the themes in a separate website. Visit Template Row at http://templaterow.com for full details and demo.