Four WordPress Themes that We Love to Love…(all over the place)

If you’ve been following along lately, you know that Scott and I are working on establishing our own internet businesses. We’ll both be starting new blogs as part of the business model, and this week we’ve been spending a lot of time looking for that perfect WordPress theme. In this post, we’ll show you our “short list” of themes we’re considering for our business blogs – and we’d love to hear opinions from any of you who have used any of these themes. We’re probably going to be making our final decision this week.

Determining Your Needs When Choosing a Blog Theme

Before shopping around for a Wordpress theme, you should have a general idea of how you want your blog to look and function. Some themes have a two-column layout, while others are arranged with three columns. Do you want your sidebar to appear on the left or right? Is the theme you’re looking at “widget-ready?” You should also have an idea of your own ability to customize and tweak your Wordpress theme. In our case, we can handle the basics but neither of us have the time or interest to become Wordpress gurus. We are looking for something easy. Also realize that your blog doesn’t have to be perfect on launch day. You will be improving your business – including your blog – for years to come.

With that in mind, we were looking for a blog theme that’s easy to manage, has room to grow, and will allow us to get a business blog up and running quickly with as little headache as possible. There are plenty of flashy, shiny, eye-catching blogs out there. But for our needs, we’ve narrowed them down to [drumroll, please] Our Top 4 Picks for Wordpress Themes:

…and yes, I’m saving the best for last.

Thesis Theme

If you haven’t heard of Thesis by now, you may want to come out of your cave for a minute and have a look around. Thesis comes from DIY Themes, and was recently upgraded to version 1.6. You can see a demo of Thesis and its new bells and whistles in this video. The big selling point of Thesis seems to be SEO optimization. From the DIY site:

Thesis boasts the strongest SEO of any theme on the market today thanks to its expertly-coded HTML + CSS + PHP framework. Not only that, Thesis also contains additional options that will allow you to fine-tune each and every page of your site. The days of worrying about your in-site SEO are over—with Thesis, your strategy is “just add killer content.”

After viewing the demos, Thesis looks like it’s pretty easy to manage from the control panel. The only thing we’re not too crazy about is that you can typically spot a Thesis-themed blog 2 miles away.

COST: You have two purchase options for Thesis. The “Personal Use” option will cost you $87.00 and for that price you can use the theme on one site, and you are required to leave the footer attribution link intact. For $164, you can choose the Developer’s Option, which gives you the ability to install Thesis on as many sites as you want, and you can remove the links in the footer.

Frugal Theme

Frugal Theme is the creation of Eric Hamm, and in our opinion Eric is doing a great job giving Thesis some serious competition! Frugal is a nice, clean-looking theme that also seems to be fairly easy to tweak. Eric provides a nice library of video tutorials to help you get started using the theme. What makes Frugal unique? Here’s what Eric says:

In its stock form, the frugal Wordpress Theme is about as simple and clean as it gets, while still maintaining a sleek style that perfectly presents you precious content.  Right out of the box the frugal theme does nothing more than put ALL the focus on your words, images, videos or whatever you choose to display to your readers.  Almost invisible with its super simple framework, the frugal theme does nothing to distract from your pages and posts.

What attracts us most about Frugal is the design. It’s very simple, clean, and sleek. We also like the option of making a “static” homepage. Eric’s blog, Motivate Thyself, is a good example of Frugal set up to look more like a full-fledged content management system.

Frugal comes in two yummy flavors: Premium and Professional. You can see a comparison video HERE. You also have a choice of 3 licenses; Single-Use ($79), Multi-Use ($149), and Developer ($199). Check out the Frugal Store for details of all the options. For a limited time, you can get a “Combo” deal which includes the Premium and Professional themes for one price.

Affiliate Theme

This one caught my eye a while back, and although we won’t be using it for the blogs we’re developing right now, I will probably re-visit Affiliate Theme in the future, when I turn my attention back to affiliate marketing. This theme is designed with one thing in mind. You guessed it, Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate Theme is offered by Unique Blog Designs, and claims to be “the easiest way to set up and customize new affiliate websites using Wordpress.” If you are promoting a lot of products and want a quick and easy way to get your landing/sales pages designed and published, I think Affiliate Theme is definitely worth a look. There are several purchasing options for Affiliate theme, ranging in price from $97 to $297. You can find details of those options HERE. But before you purchase, make sure you sign up for the newsletter on the home page. When you do, you’ll get a promo code that’ll save you 15%.

Headway Theme – The Future of Wordpress Themes

I said I was saving the best for last, and here it is. Headway is so impressive and innovative that we’ve both watched the video numerous times just to be impressed all over again. Seriously. As far as I know, Headway is one-of-a-kind in that it offers drag-and-drop blog customization. I’m a drag-and-drop kind of person. It just doesn’t get much easier than this. You can get details about Headway’s features HERE. But what’s really exciting is that version 1.5 will be released soon and it looks amazing! Even if you’re not in the market for a Wordpress theme, you should go watch this video. It’s just that cool.

Headway is a collaborative effort between Grant Griffiths and Michael Martine (Remarkablogger.com). If you want to be able to really customize your blog but you don’t know anything about code, you’ll be amazed at what you’ll be able to do with this theme. The simplicity and flexibility of the drag-and-drop layout editor put this one on our radar, and we have yet to find anything else like it. These guys are definitely onto something, and we think that something is the future of Wordpress blog themes.

COST: The Personal option costs $87, and gives you the ability to install Headway on 2 sites. The Developer option costs $164, and allows you unlimited installations. With the developer option, you can also remove the footer attribution link. Very reasonable and competitive pricing for what this theme offers!

Right now we are definitely leaning towards Headway as the theme for our business blogs. We plan to make a final decision by the end of the week. And, once we get a behind-the-scenes peek, we’ll post a more thorough review.

We’d Love to Have Your Input!

Have you used any of these themes? If so, we’d love to hear about it! What would you like to change about the theme you’re currently using? What other theme(s) should we consider before making our final decision?

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