Now that I had my blog pretty much functional, I wanted to explore some of the available themes. I was looking for something with a predominantly white background, three columns and widget ready so that I could customize it quickly and add features later on as needed.
Large selection of themes
I spent a couple of hours looking at the large collection at the WordPress ThemeViewer. It has a really nice sorting feature that lets you search based on number of columns, color, widget-readiness, and other attributes. Most of the themes are quite artistically designed, and targeted at different kinds of blogging needs — personal blogs, professional websites, newsletters, and so on. I have been using xmark-101 for about a week, and liked its very practical design. But since I wanted to try and place some AdSense blocks, I figured a theme with 3 columns would give me more flexibility.
Most liked
The ones that I liked the most were blue-zinfandel-10, intensive-01, oldschool-10, tiga-06 and talian-10. I tried all these, and found that oldschool-10 and talian-10 were the ones that really suited my needs, and between these two, I liked the softer color theme of the latter. So I decided to use talian-10, and went about customizing it.
