Build A Blog

A Thrilling Wordpress Theme…

Written by Mandy

So we’re in 2010 a start of a new year and I’m raring to go! It’s funny how a new year makes me feel like that!

Anyway, I thought it was time for a change and a facelift for Build a Blog. It’s not just a cosmetic change that I’m looking for, I wanted some specific features for the blog. Like better integration of social media as well as the usual RSS feed, out of the box SEO optimisation and built in ad management. Mostly I wanted to find a theme that would work straight out of the box and was full of features, now that’s a nice little wish list on it’s own but I wanted all this in a free theme, if I was going to buy a theme then I already knew what I’d use (more of that to come). I suppose in one way this was quite a lazy approach but I didn’t want to have to fiddle about in the backend of the blog alot because I wanted to concentrate on content creation instead.

I know how hard it can be to find a quality free Wordpress theme so I’m sharing what I’ve found with you. Luckily I came across the Thrilling Theme for Wordpress by Cody McKibbon and knew straight away it was what I was looking for, it’s very neat and clean which makes it easy to use and has all of the main features (and more) that I was looking for. Here are some of my favourites:

4 Color Schemes – Shades of Grey, Thrilling Orange, Black & White, Icy Blue
Search Engine Optimized
Add your own snapshot image to the header
Easy integration with Twitter and Flickr
Tabbed features/popular posts & more in the sidebar
Integration with FeedBurner email subscriptions
125×125 and 300×250 ad management
3 widget-ready sidebar areas
Gravatar support in comments
Compressed CSS & minified JavaScript for faster load time
Custom page templates for archives, sitemap & photo galleries
Easy customization with the integrated theme options page

Some of these features help cut down on the amount of plugins that I would use because they are already hard coded into the theme, which is great because that’s less to go wrong and have to maintain. The best part is that it’s free to use which surprised me because of the quality of the theme, you can donate though. Although there’s no proper support for the theme with it being free (it’s pretty straight forward) there is some help available in frequently asked questions that have been answered and bug reporting.

I’m really happy with the results and it was very easy to set up – So please take a look around and see what the theme can do? Let me know what you think in the comments…

Mandy

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