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20 More Free First-Class Wordpress Themes

March 25th, 2008 in Developer's Toolbox | 160 Comments

Free professional WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

However, to create a unique design, sometimes it’s not enough to change colors or increase font-size of a theme designed by other designers. The uniqueness of a theme is all about little details, some personal touches in the play of link colors, footer and header. Therefore in most cases it’s useful to think of free Wordpress themes as a playground for your imagination.

In this article we present 20 fresh free high-quality WordPress themes. Unfortunately, over the last months they haven’t gained the popularity they deserve which is why they are now featured on Smashing Magazine. All themes can be downloaded, customized and used for free — in personal or/and commercial projects. Please read license disclaimers carefully before using the theme in commercial projects — they can change from time to time.

You might also want to take a look at our previous selections:

100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes
Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects.
83 Beautiful WordPress Themes
An overview of beautiful, but rather unknown themes you might have missed.
21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant Themes
A quite pretty selection of elegant yet well thought-out themes.
10 Fresh and Clean Themes
The beauty of these themes lies in their clean look supported by a legible content presentation.
…and please take a look at Dr. Web’s free Wordpress Themes

Well, let’s dive in.

Free First-Class Wordpress Themes

1. Going Global Wordpress Theme [ preview ]
A stylish 2-column theme with a streamlined container and a ‘global’ motif. It is vibrant and exciting and might suit for both corporate and personal blogs. There are two adslots in the sidebar for graphic banner ads.

2. Balance Black
A clear 2-column theme with excellent use of typography. You might need to replace Croatian buttons with social bookmarking buttons. No preview is available.

3. Leopress [ Demo ]
The tiger is striking again; now in WordPress. This 3-column WordPress theme looks exactly like the user interface in Mac OS X Leopard looks like. The navigation is also similar. Have fun tweaking the Leopard for your needs.

4. Springloaded [ Demo ]
A fresh, colorful and nicely structured 2-column theme with support for widgets, gravatars and a handful of other nifty plugins.

5. Probama Theme [ Demo ]
Politics isn’t our realm and we don’t promote Obama here, but this theme is very nice. Built-in control panel options allow easy management of images, video, podcasts, latest-post highlighting on homepage and other RSS info. This truly professional theme can be developed further for your personal needs.

6. Striped Flowers [ Demo ]
A beautiful, colorful and lively 2-column WordPress theme. You’ll find a dozen of further quite colorful themes on this site as well.

7. Tiny Studio [ Demo ]
This theme was designed to match the concept of a small design studio. This theme uses custom fields to display the top 10 latest artworks in the Latest Artworks section.

8. Stilbruch [ preview ]
An elegant, simple and sexy 1-column-theme. Simple, yet beautiful.

9. Rio Theme
Easy, fast, minimalistic but a powerful appearance. “It gives your blog the look it deserves and says: You don’t need any overloaded layouts to compensate anything. Be yourself!”

10. Summernight WordPress Theme [ preview ]
This theme attempts to catch the feeling of a long, exciting summernight and lets you tell your adventures with big, eye-catching pictures. Quite provocative, but hey - it’s all about the unique style, right? Easily customizable and best used with dark, patterned backgrounds.

11. slide-o-matic [ demo ]
One-column, clear and simple. With a sliding navigation menu.

12. The Wind Cries Mary [ demo ]
An elegant, beautiful and with “traditional” typography. A 2-column Wordpress theme.

13. Textback WordPress Theme [ preview ]
“Snow-white, bright and incredible clear; this wordpress theme is the perfect choice for everyone, who is sick of crowded and uncreative designs and wants to take a deep breath. Who wants a restart. Because this is the job of the winter: To be a recommencement.”

14. Balance White
A light version of Balance Black; a clear 2-column theme with excellent use of typography. You might need to replace Croatian buttons with social bookmarking buttons. No preview is available.

15. NT-Musicgirl [ demo ]
You can do so much out of it. A Wordpress-theme in retro-look. Slim columns, stylish design. You might want to increase the font-size and improve the design of forms, though.

16. Facebook Layouts [ demo ]
A Wordpress-theme similar to the original Facebook’s design. You can also easily change colors. “As simple as the Facebook design itself, this theme brings it all together. “

17. Theme Lab [ demo ]
A colorful and nicely structured Wordpress theme which comes with 8 different styles and a style switcher.

18. The Massive News “Mobile Edition” WordPress Theme [ demo ]
“The popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch are on the rise, and I felt it just made sense to create a WordPress theme that is built entirely for optimized viewing on both devices. The Massive News Mobile Edition WordPress theme does just that, bringing you all the perks of WordPress to boot.”

19. The Unstandard WordPress theme
“The Unstandard WordPress theme is released / shared with the intent of breaking the typical blog mold. Farewell to the blase reverse chronological text heavy front pages, and hello to visuals & imagery to lure visitors deeper into your website / blog. A WordPress theme comprised of a - grid aligned - images for forward facing pages, and clean textual presentation on the inner pages.”

20. Chronicles [ demo ]
“In the literary sense, chronicle is a written record of events presented in order of time, and updated regularly over a prolonged period. This is a dark-brown colored, fully validated, widget-ready, 3-column theme with rounded edges all around it.”

Bonus: WordPress Admin Themes and Experiments

The default Admin WordPress theme isn’t as user-friendly as most designers would like it to be. That’s why some developers design WordPress Admin User interfaces. The results are indeed, user-friendly.

WordPress Tiger Administration
“For several reasons, I didn’t want to touch the XHTML framework of the admin, but instead relied on the power of CSS2 to manipulate the presentation. The whole package has been wrapped up into a single plugin. Just install and activate. The new design will be immediately visible.”

Fluency Admin
We’ve featured this theme already, but it fits perfectly to this post. The menus are rearranged; main menus are down left and sub menus are placed across the top. To install the theme download the zip file, extract the contents and upload the whole ‘wp-admin-fluency’ folder to your web server. Then go into your WordPress admin and go to the ‘plugins’ page, activate ‘Fluency Admin’ and you will instantly be using the theme.

Prologue [ Demo ]
“We’re fans of Twitter around here, but while the format appealed to us it really just whetted our appetite for something more, like a way for each of us to share short messages about what we’re doing or working on internally, or private messages between groups of folks.”

WP Contact Manager [ demo ]
WP Contact Manager is a different kind of theme for WordPress. With a little bit of work (outlined in detail below) it turns WordPress into a contact manager. You can add contacts through the regular admin interface, tag contacts, search them and more.

Published in Developer's Toolbox, March 25th, 2008
Tags: blog, free, layout, themes, wordpress

1.

Natrium (March 25th, 2008, 3:15 am)

Thanx! This are some excellent designs!
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2.

Michael (March 25th, 2008, 3:26 am)

Great stuff!

Very inspiring.

Smashing is definitely one of those sites you have to check daily :D
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3.

Edwin (March 25th, 2008, 3:29 am)

Some good designs indeed, but in my opinion a lot of garbage this time, especially nr. 9 and 10 are like shit.
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4.

Syed Balkhi (March 25th, 2008, 3:33 am)

I like the Mac Wordpress Style, and I love the style in fluency, but there is only one problem with that. It doesn’t work in IE 7.0 .. I clicked activated on the plugin and nothing happens in IE then I deactivated and ran it with firefox and activated it … and It works on FF, but when I open IE again it won’t work. So I have two different admin panel skin in two different browsers… Waste my time
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5.

Mike (March 25th, 2008, 3:40 am)

Those Wordpress themes are awesome! Thanks a lot! I especially like Leopress.
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6.

Shane (March 25th, 2008, 3:57 am)

Fantastic source of inspiration - many thanks for posting.
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7.

Nahne (March 25th, 2008, 3:59 am)

The first theme looks very much like the site of the design agency Link [www.mutado.com]. Similar color scheme, typography, overall layout…
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8.

Adam Blane (March 25th, 2008, 4:00 am)

Have you seen the new Upstart Blogger theme? It’s Link [www.upstartblogger.com]
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9.

Freddy (March 25th, 2008, 4:01 am)

Thanks for sharing this amazing work !
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10.

Daniel Condurachi (March 25th, 2008, 4:06 am)

Thank you! Those are very good ideas for me because in the near future I intend to redo my blog and combine it fully with my portfolio
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11.

Robin (March 25th, 2008, 4:10 am)

Nice list. I particularly like the “Unstandard” theme - a really nice looking, original approach to a blog layout.
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12.

Ray (March 25th, 2008, 4:10 am)

Blog Perfume has just released a Clean and Soft 3 Column WordPress Theme called SilveRay today. You can view it on Link [www.blogperfume.com]
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13.

Chet (March 25th, 2008, 4:18 am)

First of all, I’ve just discovered your blog, and I can’t tell you how impressed I am with the depth of your posts. It’s become one of my favorites in Google Reader.

Secondly, since folks are more and more turning to Wordpress as a CMS tool, I would be interested if anyone knows of any themes that would be more directed toward a restaurant. Something that would allow menu pages, and a front page blog? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Wordpress used this way, but maybe one of you have…?
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14.

kuswanto (March 25th, 2008, 4:30 am)

Nice list, but i am kind bored how you guys always highlight Wordpress theme. There are other CMS out there that has many splendid theme.
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15.

URL Script (March 25th, 2008, 4:31 am)

I’ve been waiting for more wp themes, thanks for the list!
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16.

laloj (March 25th, 2008, 4:37 am)

Link [www.tech-exposed.com]

Nice find. I was looking for new templates to use for my upcoming projects.
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17.

taddict (March 25th, 2008, 4:42 am)

wtf is up with the summernight wordpress theme picture?
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18.

Peter (March 25th, 2008, 4:43 am)

One that’ll definitely make your next WP themes list :

Link [www.blogperfume.com]

demo : Link [www.blogperfume.com]
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19.

Eivind (March 25th, 2008, 5:10 am)

Definitely a great roundup, but as mentioned; whiskey-tango-foxtrot is up with that article image in summernight?! Anyways, keep up the good work, you’re a daily read!
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20.

Carlos Eduardo (March 25th, 2008, 5:38 am)

Wow! Some nice examples of Wordpress themes… I like most of them :)
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21.

Anthony Bruno (March 25th, 2008, 5:41 am)

Please note. Admin themes are for 2.5+ only.
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22.

Pspack (March 25th, 2008, 6:12 am)

Thanks,
Very nice collection.
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23.

gr8pixel (March 25th, 2008, 6:21 am)

thanks!
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24.

JFoam (March 25th, 2008, 6:23 am)

Thankz! I love the list!
Finally found a wp theme that looks like what i want, now i just have to edit the sh*t outa it ;)
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25.

Marcel (March 25th, 2008, 6:39 am)

Hey, the article image in the Summernight WordPress theme is a tribute to the great Japanese artist Link [www.marichan.com].
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26.

Eureka (March 25th, 2008, 6:47 am)

it’s cool,thanks
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27.

Igor Jovic (March 25th, 2008, 6:54 am)

Hey guys thanks a lot for this post!

I was just wondering, are you in the nearby future going to, instead of Wordpress themes, present some smashing free CSS templates?
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28.

Eureka (March 25th, 2008, 7:04 am)

like it!
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29.

Mayooresan (March 25th, 2008, 7:15 am)

Thanks a lot.. as a newbie theme creator. I can learn alot from this themes!!! :)
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30.

One Winged Angel (March 25th, 2008, 7:42 am)

Thanks for featuring my theme, Tiny Studio. Greatly appreciated!
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31.

Missy (March 25th, 2008, 8:13 am)

Before you post a theme here, do you check that it is actually genuine? I’ve had problems with a couple of “theme” sites who have stolen my current site design and tried to pass it off as a Wordpress theme. Fortunately for me I caught them out before it had been distributed too widely!
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32.

Sean (March 25th, 2008, 8:51 am)

Um. Did you really have to post a picture of an illustrated gurl spurting blood out of her woohoo? Did you really?
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33.

Yuck! (March 25th, 2008, 8:53 am)

We can certainly do without the disgusting images next time!
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34.

Marcel (March 25th, 2008, 9:09 am)

Oh come on, that’s modern manga stylish art from a very charming Japanese artist. I think it’s great.
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35.

SGD (March 25th, 2008, 9:23 am)

Gorgeous. :) Are there comparable sets out there for Movable Type? That’s what our company uses… would be nice to swap out the standard (but blase) MT templates with something better.
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36.

Jogos (March 25th, 2008, 9:31 am)

Thank you very much. I liked most of them. Those are really top quality themes. Gonna try third one on my blog :P.
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37.

Taylor (March 25th, 2008, 9:46 am)

yay leopress
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38.

pigsbladder (March 25th, 2008, 11:03 am)

Am I correct in understanding you can’t use these themes unless you pay for the custom css in wordpress? If not how do I use them?
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39.

m (March 25th, 2008, 11:40 am)

thanks, good list
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40.

Aditya (March 25th, 2008, 11:40 am)

Hats off to you guys for putting together such a high quality collection of brilliantly designed Wordpress themes. I have tried hard to find a good theme for my personal blog, and this list is giving me a hard time to zero in on one. Good stuff!
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41.

Abilene (March 25th, 2008, 12:21 pm)

Awesome list.
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42.

more caffeine (March 25th, 2008, 12:25 pm)

Sweet! There are some very nice, professional themes there that I have never seen. Thanks
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43.

Chetan (March 25th, 2008, 12:26 pm)

No 9 and 10 is just Shit and the only one looking impressive is 12…

Thanks for no 12.
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44.

Shaun (March 25th, 2008, 12:30 pm)

Woah, brilliant. Thanks very much!
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45.

Xesús (March 25th, 2008, 2:12 pm)

A very nice collection. Thanks
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46.

Ben May (March 25th, 2008, 4:39 pm)

Some of the best designs / WP themes I’ve seen
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47.

Vix (March 25th, 2008, 5:14 pm)

These are all really beautiful themes though technically #12 is a Link [community.livejournal.com]
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48.

zoel (March 25th, 2008, 6:02 pm)

I love Wordpress, WP is blog engine but power engine for next web generation, I trust next time WP as propesional just not a blog only
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49.

megatron (March 25th, 2008, 6:44 pm)

For both “Balance White” and “Balance Dark” themes I ran across this when researching a query bug:

Link [wordpress.org]

From the sounds of it, these themes should not be used at any time. Is anyone able to confirm this? I do like the minimal layout…
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50.

Adrian (March 25th, 2008, 7:30 pm)

Once again, excellent list. I love the visual emphasis of Unstandard. Speaking of visuals, anyone else trying the beta of Link [searchme.com]? It is NICE. If you are visual like me, you will love it.
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51.

Haobam (March 25th, 2008, 7:45 pm)

Link [deanjrobinson.com] is one kick ass theme from the creator of Fluency. Except that it got some issue with IE6.
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52.

Moin (March 25th, 2008, 9:58 pm)

Very cool!! gj
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53.

mattems (March 25th, 2008, 10:56 pm)

another quality smashing post!

love the iPhone / touch theme, great thinking. Interesting to see if you can target the device so you can have two themes one for desktop and one for mobile.
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54.

Auron (March 26th, 2008, 12:07 am)

As easy as it is to hack wordpress these days the LAST thing anyone needs to do is try to make WP into a contact management system.

WP used that way is just a bad bad idea…
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55.

mee (March 26th, 2008, 1:11 am)

Wow, cool. I diden’t knew that I can change the admin skin as well …
ThanX
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56.

Spence (March 26th, 2008, 3:03 am)

I like 9 and 10, best thing about Smashing is there is something for everyone
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57.

David (March 27th, 2008, 1:59 am)

Loving the Facebook Theme!!! Great post SM!!
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58.

wolkanca (March 27th, 2008, 6:12 am)

Great post.
thanks.
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59.

DjZoNe (March 27th, 2008, 7:20 am)

Recently I wanted to change my theme, now I’m definitely sure, that I will. And you gave me some really good alternatives.
Thank you :)
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60.

Adam Tiler (March 27th, 2008, 8:29 am)

Did you even briefly consider a different demo photo for Summernight?
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61.

denny (March 27th, 2008, 9:08 am)

Could someone tell me what is the best theme for a free press magazine? Is there something that fit for this?
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62.

jez (March 27th, 2008, 9:51 am)

wonder why you did not include Link [www.h4x3d.com], but maybe that is because it is not “mainstream” enough.
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63.

moserw (March 27th, 2008, 12:07 pm)

Thanks for sharing such a good list. Truly appreciated. Going to try some of them on my website.
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64.

vince (March 27th, 2008, 1:57 pm)

other nice themes > Link [] :)
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65.

BGR (March 27th, 2008, 3:09 pm)

did nothing for me. I will stick with 3K2
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66.

rohit (March 28th, 2008, 1:43 am)

fantastic work indeed …
thx
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67.

Neezar (March 28th, 2008, 7:35 am)

Hmm..
I like probama theme, theme for Obama supporter like me..
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68.

Matt (March 28th, 2008, 2:05 pm)

Has any one added working sidebar code for leopress? if you have please let me know Mat at newmacuser dot com
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69.

helper (March 28th, 2008, 4:58 pm)

You get a self hosted WordpPrss blog. You probably wouldn’t be able to use any of them even if you did pay for that ridiculous css “upgrade” thing in WordPress dot come.
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70.

James (March 28th, 2008, 10:08 pm)

Awesome - very creative and artistic.
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71.

Agnes (March 29th, 2008, 5:53 am)

You forgot about Link [www.gebalatomasz.com]

regards.
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72.

Ounsy (March 29th, 2008, 7:34 am)

i like it nice!

keep posting good stuff!

c u soon
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73.

skilline (March 30th, 2008, 1:38 pm)

wow it’s perfect perfect perfect perfect perfect
coooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool
coooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool
coooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool
coooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool
coooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool
coooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool
coooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool
coooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool
wow it’s perfect perfect perfect perfect perfect
thx
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74.

>>> James (March 31st, 2008, 3:48 am)

good read thanx for taking the time to write it

very interesting
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75.

Jonathan Franzone (March 31st, 2008, 8:45 am)

Excellent list of very high quality designs. Thanks so much for compiling.
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76.

Justin (pusha) (March 31st, 2008, 12:32 pm)

The summer night theme looks great but trying to use it is a pain in the ass. I understand why you wouldn’t want to provide support for a theme, but if you release a theme to the public at least provide a readme with some sort of explanation. Especially since this theme does not work out of the box- it uses a different format for the side tabs, and utilizes some plug ins - What are the settings for the plug ins? I don’t know! Maybe it’s in the notes folder……Wait. That folder’s empty. Hahhaa. YOU LOSE!
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77.

Bill (April 1st, 2008, 9:30 am)

I am in love with Fluency.
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78.

Ilka (April 5th, 2008, 3:34 am)

Sehr tolle Zusammenstellung von Themen, ich habe mir gleich Anregungen holen können.

Stürmische Grüße von der Link [www.ostseeblick-nienhagen.de]
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79.

Free Classifieds - Free ads (April 6th, 2008, 5:42 am)

I would recommend to promote or post the topic under Link [www.orientalads.com] such as OrientalAds.com which can help to get more response world wide at free of cost.
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80.

Zach (April 7th, 2008, 5:12 pm)

The summernight picture is one reason why I can’t read this blog at work.
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81.

Nano (April 14th, 2008, 1:50 pm)

sucks
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82.

Candice (April 16th, 2008, 8:52 am)

does anyone know of a software where I can design my own template but it automatically puts the codes in for me, I just drag and drop??? Premium themes are not what im looking for and custom blog designs are to expensive, please help
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83.

Paul Harvey (April 18th, 2008, 3:06 am)

Smashing Magazine, you have done it again! This is just about the ultimate location for real inspiration.

Keep up the stella job folks :)
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84.

muzrek (April 18th, 2008, 3:54 am)

really good desings . i like too its. thanks for works.. wordpress forever
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85.

Gafoloji.com (April 20th, 2008, 2:47 am)

woww very prof. themes thanks ı love you smashingmagazine.com
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86.

Hani Salem (April 30th, 2008, 6:54 am)

Hi
you have a nice work here friend com visite me on my site and forums
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