Ben Stewart

It is so easy to give your blog a professional look these days by grabbing a well-made, free WordPress theme and tweaking it to your specific tastes. The biggest hurdle is filtering out all of the poorly-made themes that are floating around the interwebs to find the right one to start with.

There are tons of websites that offer free WP themes these days, but I have found that many of those themes lack features, flexibility, usability, or simple beauty that even beginning bloggers deserve. However, several design companies and individual designers who make premium (for-pay) themes offer certain themes completely free of charge. Usually these are older themes or simplified themes, but they are often higher quality than 80% of the other free themes you will find.

So without further adieu, here are a few of my recent favorite places to find free WordPress themes:

• http://designdisease.com/portfolio
• http://www.woothemes.com/category/themes
• http://human3rror.com/2009/02/06/simpl3-theme-release (only one theme)
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/category/freebies
• http://freebiethemes.com/themes (a few very simple, minimalist themes)

Do you have a favorite place for free WordPress themes?

Sorry to post another link instead of actual content here, but this almost made me embarass myself by laughing out loud at Bongo Java. Shaun really does have the spiritual gift of sarcasm.

Shaun in The Nature

There are some good posts from Shaun’s recent trip to the Dominican Republic over at Shlog.

I don’t know how he keeps from going crazy living in American culture after these trips. There has to be a period of transition or immersion back into our sense of normal (or maybe the idea is to forget our sense of normal).