All Freelance Writing » wordpress theme

3 Places to Get Great WordPress Themes

Jennifer Mattern — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:05:02 +0000

There’s no question about it. Blogging can be great for your freelance writing business. Your blog can attract clients. You can use it to create a “living” portfolio of your writing. Your blog can highlight your niche expertise. And blogging can connect you to colleagues and prospects you want in your professional network. It can also bring in direct income and be a lot of fun.

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.

InBloom: Free WordPress Theme

Jennifer Mattern — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:54:03 +0000

We haven’t released a theme from Chris Hennis recently, but here’s his latest. Again, this is a free WordPress theme available exclusively through All Freelance Writing! It’s ideal both for blogs and professional sites. If you use it, feel free to share a link to your site in the comments so we can see how you’re using it to promote your freelance writing business. Please read the information below before downloading.

What’s Included

The coded theme
.psd files for various theme elements so you can easily change the look of the design

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

InBloom: Free WordPress Theme

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

Click the download link below.
Save the file to your hard drive.
Unzip / decompress the file (in Windows, right-click the file name and go to “extract all.”
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.

Some Design Changes Coming to All Freelance Writing

Jennifer Mattern — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:14:11 +0000

I like our current blog design a lot, but I’m still going to be implementing some changes in coming weeks. I want to optimize our load time by cutting down on some of the images, and I’ll be tweaking fonts, colors, etc. a bit (the general color scheme won’t change). I don’t feel like dealing with a complete overhaul, so the site structure will stay the same. These will mostly be surface changes. I just wanted to give everyone a heads up so you know what’s going on if things suddenly look different.

PushIt Free WordPress Theme

Jennifer Mattern — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:06:12 +0000

PushIt is a free WordPress theme that I purchased and am distributing here for your use. I hope you enjoy it. Please read the information below before downloading, and review the README file to learn how to use the special features of this theme. I’m going to be releasing some edited versions of this later on with different functions to make usage easier, but until I figure out all of the adjustments I want to make, I wanted to release the original.

What’s Included

The coded theme
The .psd file
.psd for the logo and other images (so you can edit them and re-upload them with your own site name and logo)

Terms

Please remember that all free Web templates and WordPress themes from All Freelance Writing are released under the following terms: You’re free to use it on your own sites (and you do not have to include a credit link or anything like that), 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 AllFreelanceWriting.com. 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).

Notes

Read the Readme.txt file included in your download for instructions on how to use the sticky post feature, homepage thumbnail images, twitter updates and more.
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’ll be creating some posts here for members in the near future showing you how to make minor adjustments, but if you want to know how to do something specific ask in the comments and maybe I’ll turn the response into one of those posts.

To Download

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

Once you have the folder decompressed, you can open the .psd file in Photoshop or a compatible program (like GIMP). 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.

New AFW Design Coming Soon

Jennifer Mattern — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:32:59 +0000

While I transition from full-time client work and part-time writing for myself to full-time writing for myself with part-time client work, I’m moving several of my blogs to unique and custom designs. All Freelance Writing is next on that list. This weekend I finished the design itself. I’m hoping to get my coder started on it this week, and as soon as it’s ready, tested, and functioning properly with the plugins and such I want to use, it will go live.

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!)