If you’re serious about blogging, and are trying to run a quality blog on a specific topic, you need a good design. Ideally, you want to have a unique design, built by a designer, though you can get away with a pre-made theme if you’re on a budget, or if you want to wait until the blog can pay for the design.

If you’re not ready to hire a designer, you can use a freely available WordPress theme, or a premium theme. Premium themes are pre-made templates for WordPress, which, though they are not free, cost much less than hiring a designer to make a unique theme.

Once you’ve picked-out a good theme, make it your own. Put your logo in the header, tweak the colors a little, and whatnot. Customize it so it matches your site’s personality.

Now that the introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the fun part. Following are a few WordPress themes that, in my opinion, are professional and well-done. (more…)

Working on a new theme for your blog? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could edit a theme, and preview the results, without activating it for all to see? Yes, you can do that.

You could do it the hard way, and install another copy of Wordpress in another location (your local computer, a directory of your website, etc). Or you do it the easier way and use the Preview Theme Plugin for Wordpress.

Preview Theme, when installed, allows you to view a theme by appending ?preview_theme=ThemeName to a page’s URL. So to view WSC’s index with the Wordpress Classic theme, you could use this URL: http://www.thesite.com/index.php?preview_theme=WordPress%20Classic

Cool, or what? Now you can work on your new theme, live on your blog, without letting anyone see it. and if you’re really paranoid about people not seeing the theme ( ), the plugin allows you to restrict the preview feature to certain user levels (e.g. Administrator) .

It’s February 2008, and this month’s featured Wordpress theme is Illacrimo.

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Visionary is this month’s highlighted Wordpress theme.

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This month’s Wordpress theme is Aspire.

Aspire is a great theme for a site about books, writing, or a fantasy computer game. I’m a big fan of parchmentesque designs, so this one really stood out when I was looking for a theme for this month. (more…)

Not everyone is a designer (or can afford to hire one). Luckily, you can just grab a free Wordpress theme and tweak it a little. If you decide to go that route, make sure you pick a well-designed theme.

To save you some time, I’ve assembled this list of places to find good themes. (more…)

This month’s Wordpress theme is Grid Focus.

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