Top 5 WordPress Themes

Choosing a Theme

Now you’ve set up your WordPress CMS, you’ll be looking for a great theme to install and personalise. We’ve selected our top 5 WordPress themes from Themeforest.

If you’ve not heard of Themeforest, it’s a part of Envato Market which brings together a collective of themes, plugins, graphic design and more.

1. X Theme – The ultimate theme

X Theme offers a superb range of customisation with demo content included for several sectors of business and third sector. We would recommend this theme if you are looking for a theme which grows with you as mailchimp, woocommerce, buddypress and facebook integration are supported.

The theme has many modern trends included with a handy visual design builder, which is helpful for non tech, but moderate WordPress experienced builders. The library of short codes is also very helpful and would be suited to newbie WordPress site builds.

Preview

2. U-Design – The great all rounder

We at Renaissance love this theme, although it doesn’t feature everything from X-Theme it’s less complicated and easy to customise for more advanced WordPress techies like us. We particularly liked the short  code button facility which has links to examples for visual support. The theme sections in the admin area are really easy to set up and instructions are very clear. Demo content is a little bare so be prepared to get to know this theme and you’ll do great things with it we’re sure.

Preview

3. Hudson – Flashy design for web/ graphic designers

How cool is the intro on the preview? We love the zoom out and we’re sure that it would be a great first impact for a digital designer’s clients. Demo content is perfect if you just want to get something up and ready in moments and set up is relatively simple and painless. Ins and outs for an all-rounder are okay but wouldn’t be our first choice. If you have a web/graphic design portfolio and want to show it off quickly then this theme is perfect!

Preview

4. Quickstep – Perfect for portfolio

One page portfolio with easy set up and the effects on the portfolio are smooth and professional. However, we would say the portfolio would only be suitable if you only want to showcase your images rather than informative case studies as on click of the image it only enlarges rather than offer you space to add additional info. If you don’t need that extra info, then this is a great small theme. We would say be aware that one page sites product a higher bounce rate (if you don’t know what that is, don’t stress we’ll follow this up with an article) so adding additional pages instead of the blog turning up on the same page would eliminate that and help you with analytics.

Preview

5. Craft – Great for beginners

A multi-purpose theme, does what it says on the tin and has lots of nice touches including eCommerce and video background. Clean and slightly more minimal, this theme is a good one to start you off as it’s less complicated and has lots of pre-made styles to choose from. Suits almost any style of business – except for maybe digital designers who may be looking for something a bit more special and custom.

Preview