In the process of trying to improve my Wordpress blog, increase traffic, exposure (and potentially, revenue), I have been struggling quite a bit to find my new “look”.  If you have been around lately, you may have noticed a few new themes come and go and frankly, I have not been happy about any of them.

In late hours of the evening, while I try to watch American Idol in the background, I have been browsing the internet for that “perfect” theme.  There are a few that I just think are cool. For example, I like Darren Rowse’s  Problogger.net theme.  I don’ know why, but the “busyness” of it kind of appeals to me.  It seems to have plenty of other links and features that my blog lacks.  Doing my research, this one appears to be a custom design (no surprise), but it gives me a few ideas!

In my searches, I have found a few sites that I thought had some cool themes:

http://themes.wordpress.net/

- This is the mother of all free Wordpress Themes, but I have found it almost too overwhelming and difficult to browse

http://www.wpthemesfree.com/

- Not a bad selection here and the navigation is OK.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

This website has a couple of pages of pretty kick-ass themes, and I also like it because I can browse them really quickly.  The selection is small, but the quality is rather good.

100 Themes

83 Themes

http://www.wpskins.org/

Again, quite a few to choose from, but not easy to navigate.

http://www.wordpresswow.com/

I kind of liked the navigation of this one, but it seems that you need to register (and the random dynamic advertising pop-ups kind of frustrated me)

The current theme that I am using right now is a Semiologic theme, which is probably one of the most flexible ones currently available.  It acts as more of a content management system than a blog. And then there are 1000s of other sites, primarily blogs, that also offer their collection of recommended themes that can be downloaded.  So what do you do?

One thing that is great about Wordpress is that integrating new themes is relatively easy.  Personally, I am not too concerned about using a pre-existing theme and sharing a backlink with its creator.  Still, for the “image” that I have in my mind, I do not know if I will ever be satisfied with mainstream.   The question that we all need to ask, though, is:

“Do I really need to pay hundreds, if not thousands for a custom Wordpress Theme if there are so many free ones to choose from?”