This theme uses the jQuery Masonry plugin to create a unique post layout that is gapless, no matter the height of your post. There are tons of options available and spaces for all sizes of ads.

Classy Theme

This is a very pretty theme with lots of background and color options, and it’s easy to upload your own background as well! You can arrange the header to include an ad spot or other content in the widget section. There are plenty of other widget sections and options as well.

Yummy Theme

This cute theme was designed with food bloggers in mind, but it would work great for anyone. There are optional featured post sections, an optional slider on the home page, header layout options and many other features!

Happy Theme

With pretty swirls in the background and multiple color schemes and widget areas, this theme will make your site happy.

DivaThemes has only one theme available right now as I just launched the site. (Long time readers might recognize it as an incarnation of a former design here on this site.) It’s called the Happy Theme! It comes with 5 happy color schemes, lots of widget areas, WP Menus functionality and a theme options panel where you can do things like insert your own custom logo and put in custom CSS. I can’t wait to dive in and design some more fun, cute themes.

I’m considering opening up the site for other designers to sell their themes as well, and would also consider offering themes for Blogger as well, so if you’re a designer and that sounds like something you’d be interested in, let me know.

Even with all the options available in the premium themes I have experience with, I have wondered when a theme would come out that allowed control of everything from the admin panel without the user having to touch a bit of code. When the Headway theme was released, I wondered no longer.

Blown Away

This theme has an option for everything. From simple things like changing your fonts and colors, to complex things like arranging page templates with an awesome drag and drop interface and adding sidebar widgets wherever you want. Want a whole page of widgets? No problem. Want to immediately integrate Twitter into your site? Easy. Want to automatically insert Adsense code after every post? Simple.

All these options mean that you don’t have to spend hours coding and solving layout problems, but instead, spend more time on the fun stuff. The theme is set up to accommodate custom CSS and skins, and though I haven’t yet been all the way through a site customization with it, I’ve played around with it enough to see that it should be no problem. With other themes, like Thesis for example, which really is a great theme, once you want to take the customization beyond a certain point it gets really complicated. With Headway, every site can look completely different with very little work on your part.

When is Headway not the right choice?

This is not the theme to buy if you want to have a highly designed web site right out of the box. Go to iThemes and StudioPress for that. Though I do expect that more and more skins will be available over time, Headway out of the box is clean and simple.

I could go on and on…

…but that would bore you. So, check out the video below for more about the theme and then click through to the Headway site here to learn more.

You can visit Performancing’s theme site to download. I hope you enjoy it!

Update 5/18/09: if you want the version that supports tags, you’ll need to get it from my themes site.

Click here to download the zip file.

This theme is a clean and simple design, set up for you to be able to customize it. I have included seven different header images for you to choose from in the /images file, and will be writing an upcoming series of posts on Randa Clay Design about how to completely customize your theme using this as a base. Links to that series will be posted here when available. To change the header image, open the Stylesheet file in the Theme Editor, and change the header image name in the following area of code in the #head section near the top of the file:

background-image: url(images/headerdrop.jpg);

Here are the header images:

headerdrop.jpg:

headerleaf.jpg:

headerred.jpg:

headerroad.jpg:

headerrose.jpg:

headerwater.jpg:

headerfield.jpg:

I have redone both the 3 column and the 2 column version.

Download the 3 column version

Download the 2 column version

Essay, by Ian Stewart:

A minimalist approach that makes great use of white space and typography. I’m not really sure why the designer included so much margin on the left though…

Milkia, by Christian Betancourt:

An utterly clean design with focus on content alone. It could use a smidge more color though.

Mix, by Jauhari Nurudin:

Though I’m not fond of the seafoam green, the designer makes excellent use of icons and colors in the sidebar to differentiate between sections.

Prima, by Sunaryo Hadi:

This design is very pretty, and makes a nice use of borders on the posts to pop them off the page a little. Better colors could have been chosen to go with the brown though, and I think a serif font would have worked better for the blog title.

Sakena, by Shazia Mistry:

A lovely design with a very “un-bloggy” look about it. Neat use of Flickr images to create a header. I would have included more margin between the content and the sidebar.

Sandpress, by Arpit Jacob:

Beautiful and sleek- I love the reflections on the date icons and the navigation is very nice. The black box containing the RSS options certainly pops out at you, but it’s rather jarring, and would have been nicer using the blue as background.

Shades of Gray, by Leslie Franke:

This design is very sharp and clean. The post column is a bit wide though- it’s better practice to keep your content columns to 15 or so words per line for readability.

Certainly design is subjective, but I think the clear winner is Sandpress. What do you think? Want to know what the judges thought? The winners are to be announced on August 6, 2007, by 12:00 AM.

So, what about my own big announcement that I mentioned in Thursday’s post…? It’s contest time! I have a great contest planned for the next couple of weeks. Want details? Next post….

Thanks to everyone who has been participating in the very interesting discussion in the prior post. I appreciate all the thoughtful comments.

You can click here to download the zip file and if you want to see a live demo, it’s up right now at my testsite. As always, let me know if you have any problems with it or have any feedback.

Attend one of many respected online universities today! Discover the ins and outs of web design with an online web design degree. Who knew that learning online could be so simple, and still further your education. Earn your bachelor degree today.

Today I am releasing my second theme for WordPress called “Bluebird”. It’s a blue and brown, three column theme designed for at least 1024×768 resolution. My first theme, Round and Round, has almost 500 downloads, which is a respectable number I guess, but I’m hoping I can beat that with this latest theme. I know to get a really large number of downloads I need to design one that’s not quite so girly, so that will be my goal next time!

The demo will be here on my test site for a while if you want to take a look, and the zip file is here if you’d like to download it. It will be on the WordPress theme viewer as soon as I can get it uploaded. They’ve had a bit of a problem over there, and have not allowed new theme designers to sign up easily to upload themes, so I’m again relying on the kindness of a friend to upload it for me. I’m interested in any comments you might have.