I’m just new into blogging public and i like to use Wordpress for this. Its easy to install and very user friendly in the backend. Beside this, it got some great features and themes for free. But everything got two sides, the same with wordpress themes. I was looking more than two days across the web to find some good and nice templates.

Right now, I’m using Mystique from digitalnature which is not too bad. Well, for a free template its great! As i come from the Joomla side, I’m missing some really professional looking themes. Everywhere i see those bubble and itheme 2.0 style which you can find everywhere. I know I’m not getting a lot of friends by saying this but i was just looking for a great looking professional theme and not too much “candy style”.

I’m still looking for a great one, maybe also a paid template but beside this the theme should be 3 column as i like this kind of a site or blog. Don’t get me wrong, there are thousands of free 3 column themes available on the market but a dozen of them got some base64 encode code inside the functions.php, footer.php or header.php files. Sure, i was able do decode it and saw that it makes some queries to see if the footer credits are still there. That’s not a big deal, but i don’t like encode strings in my files.

So, for now i will give my eyes a rest with dump stunning on thousand templates across the web.

Maybe i should point out which things i love on template:

• SEO optimized
• Tabeless
• Threaded comments
• 3 column
• Magazine style
• Ad slots
• Grid system?
• No strange code inside the files
• A fresh looking light theme (don’t like dark themes that much)
• Featured position
• Category positions (it should show a snippet of the last post of this cat on the homepage)
• …

I guess i could add much more things to this list but it wouldn’t make any big change.

Just as an example, which theme i really like: mashable.com gots a brilliant overview on their blog, i wonder how they are dealing with the different “modules” on each page. Which brings me to the next thing. I have mentioned a Grid system. As already said, i like to build my sites with joomla, and rockettheme.com are the killer devs from my pov. They are using the 960 grid system (http://960.gs/) for their own developed template framework called gantry. It would be too much to go deeper into both systems but if you are familiar with them, you could know what i mean. So I’m wondering if something like this is also available for wordpress and its themes.

I will give it ago in the next days and try to find some more great themes free or paid.

If you got some nice ideas, let me know!