High quality, free blog templates are hard to find. Now that you’ve found the right hosting provider, and set up your WordPress blog, you may wondering about the best blog template to make it look great, and attract tons of advertisers and readers. In the course of this article, I’ll lay out four of what I’ve found to be the best free WordPress blog templates that look great, are easy to work with, and can lay the foundation for making your blogging fun and successful. Read on for the full list.
But first, a quick note on definitions. In WordPress, “templates” are known as “themes.” Keep this in mind, and just think of the two words as interchangeable. The list below refers to the best free WordPress themes that I’ve found and personally worked with, both for myself, and my clients.
Neoclassical Theme
Chris Pearson, over at Pearsonified, is an expert coder who really understands how great a platform WordPress is, and has created a fantastic free theme. Neoclassical was the main theme for my own food blog, BlogEatDrink.com, for years, and has many great features, like
- Large, rotating header images
- Beautiful, clean layout & design
- SEO optimized
- Easy to customize and configure
Download the Neoclassical blog template here
Colourise
If you’re looking a darker and more mysterious blog template, this theme has a deep, dark black background, and great, clear type laid over it. The main header image is atmospheric, and very easy to change if you want to use your own. You can also easily lay out a host of “widgets” in the right side column. Additional features include:
- RSS feed
- SEO optimized
- Clear layout and navigation
- Good archive pages
Download the Colourise blog template here
Copyblogger Theme
Another Chris Pearson original, “Copyblogger” has a slightly retro newspaper-like feel to it, emphasizing type and clarity. It’s also super-simple to get up and running, and looks great in every browser.
Here are a few more features that you’ll want to know about
- SEO optimized
- Easily add and style images
- Post comments look great
- Great pull quotes for emphasizing text points in your posts
Download the Copyblogger blog template here
Ashford Theme
This great theme by Tim Bednar has a completely different feel. Not only can you blog with it, you can create really attractive Web sites of any kind with it. While you can create a really sharp blog with this theme, it goes beyond mere blogging to offer a complete Web site publishing platform. Tim’s done a great job with this theme, and continues to update it. I’ve worked with it extensively, and gotten deep into the code, so I can really recommend this theme from personal experience.
Some great features include:
- SEO optimized
- Drop-down menu navigation
- Completely customizable color palette
- Rotating home page feature area
- Comprehensive support site
Download the Ashford blog template here
With any of these four WordPress blog templates, you can quickly make your site clean and professional-looking, and start easily adding content.
And all of these themes support ads, so you can sign up for Google AdSense, and start making money from your blog.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks so much for the review. I will be doing my best to keep it evolving, specially with WP 3 due out soon.
Tim – Thanks for creating such a great CMS platform with WordPress. I think your Pro Version is great, as well, and hope that more people get a chance to learn about it and use it for their projects.
Very nice indeed, pro version is great too!