One of the earliest things you’ll do when you launch a new blog is choose its design, or theme. Generally I recommend WordPress as a blog platform for writers (and anyone else really), so today I want to share a few resources with you — places where you can find great WordPress themes.

The WordPress Themes Directory

This is the theme directory hosted by WordPress itself, and all of the options here are free. It can be a great place to start for your first blog or if you just want to play with a few themes to get the hang of customizing them.

Go there.

Elegant Themes

ElegantThemes.com is a WordPress theme club. That means you pay a yearly fee and then you can access all of the themes they’ve released in the past, and all of the themes they release while you’re a member. It also gives you access to their support forums.

This is my personal favorite theme club and I’ve used their themes on several of my smaller blogs. For just $39, it’s tough to go wrong here. But just in case you’re concerned, you can preview every theme available before you actually sign up.

Go there.

Theme Forest

Theme Forest is a great place to go if you want to purchase one-off premium WordPress themes. Prices are more than reasonable — generally in the $30-40 range. And the themes often have a lot of features available that free themes do not.

That said, you have to contend with the fact that they’re all from different designers, so there is no consistent quality. And I’ve found that while some themes are gorgeous on the surface, they aren’t all well-coded and some are quite bloated in an attempt to offer a lot of built-in options.

So if you’re brand new to WordPress, I’d suggest sticking to more straightforward options at first unless you find a theme that you won’t want to customize much. In general though, this is my first stop when I’m looking for a new base theme to customize for a project.

Go there.

If you’ve been blogging on WordPress for a while, have you used these resources? Do you have other favorite places to find WordPress themes? If so, share them (or your experiences with these sites) in the comments below.

This theme is more specifically designed to work as a portfolio / professional site. Actually, it’s a combination professional site / blog — something I’ve recently recommended here. Make sure you read all of the information below before downloading.

What’s Included

• The coded theme
• The .psd files (download those separately here)

Terms

Please remember that all free Web templates and free WordPress themes from All Freelance Writing are made available under the following terms: You’re free to use it on your own sites (and you do not have to include a credit link), but you may NOT distribute this template to others in any way. You cannot forward the files to someone via email. You cannot post the files for download on your own site. You cannot link directly to the download file on this site. If someone else wants it, they must visit this page and download it directly from this site. Also, derivative works made from the template may not be released (in other words, you can’t change the design and then distribute it to others – it’s for use on your own sites only).

Screenshot / Demo

You can view a temporary demo site at FadMarketing.com to see the theme in action.

JBlog: Free WordPress Theme from AllFreelanceWriting.com

Notes

• Remember that I do not offer technical support for the downloads. If you have simple questions, please post them as a comment on this post (do not email me about them), and if I can help I will. This way when I can’t help, maybe another member can. I don’t make any guarantees regarding these templates and themes, and I don’t have most of them up on demo sites yet.
• You can find more free WordPress themes and Web templates for freelance writers released exclusively through All Freelance Writing by browsing our full list of free stuff for writers.

To Download

1. Click the download link below.
2. Save the file to your hard drive.
3. Unzip / decompress the file (in Windows, right-click the file name and go to “extract all”).
4. That will save it to a decompressed folder.

Once you have the folder decompressed, you can upload the theme into your WordPress installation and activate it by clicking the “themes” link under “Appearance” from your WordPress admin. You can edit your theme files by visiting the “editor” link from the same menu.

You MUST also download and install the Twitter Widget plugin if you want the Twitter feed in the sidebar. The widget will go in the top sidebar section of your theme. Make sure you set that plugin to display only 1 recent tweet. There is an option in the plugin settings to hide @replies, but when I tried that it failed to pull the tweet stream, so you might not be able to do that.

I had our coder setup the test site for this theme, so I haven’t really played with it yet. So please, if you have questions just leave a comment here and I’ll take a look at the template files and try to help you get things sorted.

Rather than just springing it on you one day, I’m including a preview here, so you can get an idea of what AFW will look like moving forward. Just click the image below to view the full-size design (and note that while the preview is fixed width, the coded design will be fluid so it will extend to fit your screen size, so you won’t see the white surrounding it).

I hope you like it!

(Note: I just realized I forgot to put the bullet points in the design – other than that, this is what the finished design would look like!)