WordPress Hacks » 2-Column Themes

Free (Highly Customizable) WordPress Theme: Introducing NomeBlog

Alex Denning — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:21:40 +0000

Written by Alex Denning, a Twitter fan who has finally got around to launching his own blog, Nometech.com!

Recently WordPress has had a huge popularity surge, with the rise of ‘magazine themes’. At the same time that WordPress’ popularity has soared, people have forgotten about what WP is all about: fundamentally, it is a blogging system. Trying to keep that in mind, I’m releasing my first WordPress theme, NomeBlog.

NomeBlog is as simple or as complicated as you’d like it to be; those of you who don’t have much experience coding or don’t want to edit your theme files, you can just install the theme and leave it at that. However, those of you who are into theme customization, you’re going to love NomeBlog! Why? I’ll run down some of the features:

XHTML valid code
Auto-image resizing
Breadcrumbs
Awesome jQuery navigation
Widgetised sidebar
Author info at the bottom of posts
Related posts automatically displayed
iPhone support
‘Login’ option displayed on the navbar to those logged in
Customised default gravatar (+gravatar support)
Support for WP-Pagenavi
Sidebar blog
Built in archive
125×125 ad ready
Feedburner subscribe by email ready
Homepage thumbnail support

NomeBlog prides itself in ease of use – I originally built the theme, or at least what I based NomeBlog on for one of my other sites, Nometet.com. Why did I build it? It was taking me too long just to post something on Nometet, resizing images, inserting custom fields; I needed something that did the hard work for me. The solution was to build the NomeBlog theme.

As I’ve already said, NomeBlog is as simple or as complicated as you’d like it to be, so I’ll quickly run through some of the more advanced features:

phpthumb built in – the script that timthumb was built off, phpthumb is the image resizer to end all image resizers; it is great! Check out the getting started guide (link below) for details of how to use it in posts, alternatively, you can create the custom field ‘Image’ and on the homepage will be displayed a thumbnail of the image you’ve input.
iPhone support – as I wrote here a short while ago, iPhone support is becoming increasingly a necessity. NomeBlog supports the iPhone through the use of the iWPhone plugin, which I’ve customized. You can download the customized version of the plugin (which looks great!) here.
Customised default gravatar – fed up with random monsters and boring silhouettes being displayed next to Gravatar-less-comments? NomeBlog has built in support for your own customized Gravatar. Just upload your own image file (again, see the getting started guide) and you’re done.

It is hard to show off all the features briefly, so for the full, complete list of features and details on how to get started, check out my new blog, where there is a lengthy getting started guide. To keep updated, make sure you grab the Nometech RSS feed too!

And of course, you can view a live demo here or download the theme. It is free, but please keep the link back. Any comments would be appreciated.

Free WordPress Theme: WP Freemium

Kyle Eslick — Tue, 27 May 2008 08:00:05 +0000

With many of the top theme designers switching their focus to creating and selling premium WordPress themes, it is always good to see some premium quality WordPress themes being released for free.

Today’s theme is called WP Freemium, and it was originally created by Ptah Dunbar for BloggingTips.com. It looks like due to some complications, BloggingTips.com decided to go another route so Ptah has made this theme available for anyone for free.

Here are the advertised features:

Valid xHTML Strict 1.0 / CSS
Code is well commented for the non technical savvy
Sidebar Widgets enabled
Custom Front Page with 3 featuring articles
By default – 6 advertisement spots on all pages
Gravatars highly Supported for Comments, Author Profiles and Author Posts.
Author Byline + Promotion on single pages
Author Profiles feature prominent image of the author with bio, contact details and more
Image Gallery Support
Print Stylesheet is included.
Favicon + iPhone Webclip icon Ready
SEO Optimized title tags and headers
404 Error Page notifies admin each time someone stumbles across a broken link so they can fix it.

I was unable to find a demo, so here are some screenshots provided by the author:

Homepage

Single Page

Author Bio

Author Page

I really like how this theme was setup for a blog that has multiple authors, making it a great free option for anyone starting a multi-author WordPress blog.

If you’d like to get a copy for your WordPress blog, click over to get WP Freemium.

2-Column WordPress Themes Gallery

Kyle Eslick — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:40:05 +0000

Updated: May 13, 2012!

I have always been of the opinion that WordPress 2-column themes give your site a much better look than 3-column themes, and I think if you look around the blogosphere at what most full time bloggers use, you will see that these people tend to find the most success with 2-column themes.

There are definitely a lot of brilliant and useful 2-column themes available for WordPress users, so I figured that I would throw together a post compiling screen shots and links to some of the best 2-column themes available:

Left Sidebar 2-Column Themes

Integral Design

WordPress Hacks » 2-Column Themes

Free (Highly Customizable) WordPress Theme: Introducing NomeBlog

Free WordPress Theme: WP Freemium

2-Column WordPress Themes Gallery

Left Sidebar 2-Column Themes

Right Sidebar 2-Column Themes

WordPress Theme Galleries

Premium WordPress Theme Galleries:

Other WordPress Theme Galleries: