Premium WordPress Themes

Free WordPress Themes

The theme is good for travel-related blogs, as well as fishing/navigation/ocean/sea related blogs.

I present to you – TRAVELOGUE 1.0.

Features of Travelogue Travel Theme (version 1.0)

• Setting up TRAVELOGUE takes less than 10 minutes!;
• Easy Theme Administration from a special Options Page in the Dashboard;
• No Plug-ins Required!;
• Fully Widgetized Sidebar;
• Integrated Social Bookmarking;
• Gravatars Support;
• Threaded (Nested) Comments FULLY supported!;
• Comments, Trackbacks and Pings are separated;
• Nice footer structure;
• Compatible with all major browsers: IE 6&7, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Google Chrome;
• Built for WordPress 2.7 (NOT tested on earlier versions);
• Valid XHTML & CSS Code;

If you decide to use this theme, please leave the copyrights notice in the footer.
Thanks!

Some of you may remember that I started ThemesCloset.com by launching a free wordpress wedding theme, Ceremonial.

At the time I was still very new to WordPress themes, so the theme was very buggy and basically hard to install.

Well, since I updated yesterday EVENTINA Magazine, I decided to update this one also.

Ceremonial is a light, simple but flexible theme for wedding/fashion/music blogs.

It mostly uses shades of pink and only 1 graphic.

I’ve also added some basic social bookmarking to every post, no plug-ins required for that. Besides that, Ceremonial now supports threaded comments up to any required depth.

Features of Ceremonial Wedding Theme (version 1.5)

• Setting up CEREMONIAL takes less than 10 minutes!;
• No Plug-ins Required!;
• Integrated Social Bookmarking;
• Gravatars Support;
• Threaded (Nested) Comments FULLY supported!;
• Comments, Trackbacks and Pings are separated;
• Compatible with all major browsers: IE 6&7, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Google Chrome;
• Built for WordPress 2.7 (NOT tested on earlier versions);
• Valid XHTML & CSS Code;

If you decide to use this theme for your blog, please leave the copyrights notice in the footer.
Thanks!

This is all for today! I hope you enjoyed this collection of Free WordPress Themes. Feel free to comment about any of these themes, and make sure to share this collection with your friends :)

Ceremonial, Free WordPress Theme

• Live Demo
• Download Theme
• More Info

WordPress Version: 2.7
Columns: 2
Layout: Fixed (960px)
IE6 Compatible: Yes
IE7 Compatible: Yes
Opera 9.6 Compatible: Yes
FireFox 2 Compatible: Yes
FireFox 3 Compatible: Yes
Google Chrome Compatible: Yes
Safari Compatible: Yes
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported (allowed to distribute, but include ThemesCloset.com as source)

License

Ceremonial is Copyright © 2009 by Dumitru Brinzan. It is released under the GNU General Public License, version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation. Basically you can do whatever you like with this theme. I only ask that you please give credit where credit is due by providing a link back to my site: http://www.themescloset.com

Update: 31.03.2009 @ 6 PM

A bunch of bugs have been fixed, also a custom field (thumb) has been added for posts.
Special thanks to Pavel Ciorici @ WPZoom for the help :)

Update: 14.05.2009 @ 4 PM

CEREMONIAL Theme has been updated to version 1.5. A lot of improvements have been made, setting it up now takes less than 5 minutes!

Got anything to say about this theme? Leave a reply :)

Let us see what are the advantages and disadvantages of using a free theme or a premium them for your blog.

I remember the ol’ days when the Internet wasn’t as big as it is today, way before Google and Digg. There was no BitTorrent, there was no P2P, there was (almost) nothing.

Now, in those days, for people like me, who were only learning about the Internet, there wasn’t much to do: read some news, join a forum, waste time on IRC, etc.

Almost every web-site that you would visit would look like crap, especially small web-sites. Thus the era of “web designers” began: teenagers and students started ripping off companies for ugly sites done in Microsoft Frontpage and other site building tools. All was well.

Some years passed and BitTorrent took the world by storm. One of the side-effects of that is not as popular as the video/music sharing. It is that of sharing web-site templates.

Now web-designers had to face a small decline in job requests, as basically any kid with some basic knowledge of HTML editting could download via BitTorrent full packs of professional templates ripped off from sites like TemplateMonster.com. I had a bunch of clients who preferred paying 200$ for a full (buggy) flash site instead of developing a very own identity on the web.

The same thing happens now with the Free vs Premium themes for WordPress and the rest of the available CMSs. Well, both free and premium themes are here to stay.

Free Themes

Advantages:

• They are free (duh).
• You can change them as often as you like, without getting slapped in the… wallet.

Disadvantages

• Usually they lack support from the designer/developer (don’t expect updates).
• If the theme is good, you will see it often on other blogs, so you will not stand out in the crowd.
• Most free themes are not high-quality, sometimes the features are crudely implemented.

Premium Themes

Advantages:

• Developers of good Premium Themes will always provide full support and maybe offer to implement it on your blog, thus saving you time and headaches.
• If you bought an exclusive theme, you know that you’re the only one using the theme (if it doesn’t get ripped).
• You can ask the developer/designer to make some custom adjustments to the theme, so that it better suits your needs.
• Just like buying something at the Mall, you feel some amount of satisfaction

Disadvantages

• You have to pay for it, usually by PayPal. For people from some countries in the world, that is a problem, as they don’t have access to PayPal.

Having a premium theme is the same as having a web designer work on your site: it is done by a professional (hopefully), you can proudly advertise your  site/blog, without worrying about what people will think. Invest a couple of bucks, that surely worths it.

Have something to say? Leave a comment :)