Today I wanted to share a few great themes that I find a good starting place when building a web design WordPress website. There’s loads of themes out there to choose from, with more and more being released each day. So basically, I wanted to share a few of my favourite and what I consider to be great WordPress themes to start your website off with.
So let’s forget the premium themes, we just want a good starting platform for our bespoke theme. There’s a quite a lot of themes out there, these are just a few I’ve hand picked from using in the past. It’s completely up to you which them you start with, some of the below offer different things and starting points. I’ll run through a couple of features for each one so you can get an idea of what you are after, but I’d definitely recommend checking them all out!
Starkers Theme
Starkers is one of the classics. It’s pretty much ready to go fresh from the box. No styling whatsoever comes with this theme (which can be a good thing). All that’s there is the skeleton, leaving you to add all the meat to the bones. It’s a good theme and seems to have everything you need really. You can go for the standard version, or there’s even a HMTL5 version out that you can dabble in!
Twenty Eleven
Now, Twenty Eleven comes with a WordPress installation. I used to always use Starkers to theme my WordPress sites, but after all the demo’s I saw of Twenty Eleven and the features is had, I quickly migrated across. It’s got some great theme options you can control form the back-end of WordPress and has a default level of styling which is always handy, to give you a head start! There’s a lot of other really useful features added in to this theme – I’d definitely recommend giving it a try if you haven’t already!
Here’s a download link if you want to use it on a version of WordPress that doesn’t come with it. Download.
Bones
Now this is a super cool theme, not only is it’s website awesome, but the theme really is “all that”. It’s built in HTML5, it’s responsive and when mixed with some other features, it is awesome. Don’t let the responsive feature put you off though, it comes with a ‘classic’ version too!
This has quickly become my personal favourite - definitely check this one out.
TwentyTenFive
This is quite a cool theme to use. It was built to accompany a smashing mag article a little while ago – but again is built with HTML5 and has some coole little features. It has some schema built in and is a nice little upgrade from the TwentyTen theme.
Roots Theme
Like Bones, this WordPress theme is built with HTML5 and is responsive. I think out of the two, Bones wins my vote. That’s a little biased though as I haven’t tried this one as much as the others. It’s worth a go and looks like a great little starting point for your WordPress website.
TwentyTwelve Rumour
I also thought Id bring this to your attention. It’s a rumour that in the 3.5 version of WordPress, a new theme will be released – TwentyTwelve. Based on WordPress’ previous default themes, I can only imagine that they’ve raised the bar again to make an even better theme. It’s definitely going to be worth keeping your eye out for this one! Here’s a link to the post.
I hope this post has been of some use to you. If you use a different starter theme or know of some alternatives, I’d be interested to know what they are – so please leave any comments below!
