Honor your Wordpress Theme Creator, WP Theme Series Part 1

This is the first part of my will be series featuring different Wordpress Themes and on this entry, I’ll be featuring the Wordpress Themes that I’ve used since I began blogging with Wordpress.

I could not remember the time frames when I did use the following themes so I’ll just lay the list out and add a few Pros and Cons. And of course, these are my personal opinions. Though I am Blog Almighty - Ruler of the Cyber World, I am giving you my word but you have free will for you to decide.

• Travelogue by Josh Lyman
• PhotoBloggo by ChiQ Montes
• Vistered Little by Nik Iliadis
• SoSuechtig (Black Edition) by Patrick Queisler
• Mimbo by Darren Hoyt

Travelogue is one of the pre-installed theme when you auto-install your Wordpress Blog from your Netfirms account. What I liked about this theme is the customizable Polaroid photo on the header. I have used this theme for some time but I had to discontinue because the post body area is of flexible (fluid) width and at that time, I’m only starting with Wordpress and I didn’t want too much customization. This is highly re-commended for photo bloggers or if you don’t care about having your text dis-oriented when someone reads you in higher resolution monitors or if someone just love playing around with the window panes.

Photobloggo is another Wordpress theme designed for photo bloggers. You’ll just love the dark and yellow combination of colors. Now I can’t remember why I stopped using this theme.

Vistered Little is the first theme I ever really loved because of it’s neat and clean graphic features, the glass-like design and the varying background images. However, from mine and my readers’ point of view, the theme takes a lot of time to load. Most probably because of the heavy scripts and high resolution images.

SoSuechtig is one of the neatest Wordpress Themes I’ve ever used. Almost every function a Wordpress user would ever want is present. However, since the codes are written in German, customization could be tedious unless you have the patience of a Golden Retriever? Well, are golden retrievers really that patient?

Then came the first ever free Magazine Style Wordpress theme I ever laid eyes on – Mimbo by Darren Hoyt. I loved the use of the custom thumbnail, the flexibility of the side bar (being able to truncate the contents into several parts and make each part visible only to index, single and page pages). I’m still using the theme for my personal/photography blog and even if the theme per se could not support the inside WP Gallery pages, I’m not having any plans to replace it with another (or not for now).

Parting words: When you’re using a free Wordpress Theme, do not remove the links placed by the author. It is one way of showing gratitude and it is only rightful to give the theme developer proper credits for their work. If for some reason you can’t leave the links intact, then you might as well not use them at all. Hint: Some theme developers are releasing free themes though there were paid by advertisers to insert their corresponding URLs. Just take this theme for example and take note of the links on the footer.

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