:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

I couldn’t sleep last night, so jumped out of bed and did a little fidgeting with one of my newer blog projects. While I liked the chosen theme, it just didn’t work for the kind of content I was posting. Therefore I visited the wordpress theme viewer.
The trick was to find something that can hold a lot of content, but isn’t too flashy and overwhelming. I had the New York Times in mind.  There is a lot going on, but you can always find the main content and navigate around the various columns. Based on this criteria, my two front runners were Blue Zinfandel and RockinPaper.

In fact, the designer of RockinPaper was accused of ripping off the design of Blue Zinfandel. It turns out that they’re just friends who sometimes share elements of their designs with one another.  In the end I chose RockinPaper because I wanted to post my owner header on the page

If you’re like me, the list of wordpress themes is simply staggering. What is the best way to sort through them all to find the one golden theme? Having gone through this process a few times, I have a system that I follow.

First, I choose the number of columns I want. Then I search based on the most downloads, opening up in tabs anything that strikes my eye within at least the first ten pages. I view these in the test run screen and leave open anything that may work. Then I search based on downloads, once again sorthing through whatever looks good inthe first ten pages. Lastly, I search by date because something new may be sharp, but it may not be popular yet. That’s how I found RockinPaper.

Please note that a theme without a thumbnail can still be viewed in the test run screen, so make sure you click on every black square. You may be surprised.