As budgets get tighter and people look for ways to save money online, there is nothing like a free WordPress theme to help us do just that.

Just in case you don’t know, WordPress is an open source website content management system. It was first released in May 2003.

It is powered by PHP and a SQL data backend. As of September 2009, WordPress is used by 62.8 million websites in the US and 202 million websites worldwide.

In 2007 WordPress won a Packt Open Source CMS Award.

With all that being said the idea is to find a theme that looks close to what you are wanting the website layout to look like and then hire a web designer to modify and customize that theme.

Here are a couple themes from Smashing Magazine that I thought were really cool.

Below are a list of some of the themes I like, however to find more themes and get more information on these themes check out the link above.

Zinepress Theme

SimpleCart(js)

Paper Wall

Cool Retro

Gallery WordPress Theme

Folio Elements Theme

Destyle Theme

Cool Retro

Calmdream WordPress Theme

Berita

AppCloud Theme

“Website Design Companies”

I know that I sometimes come off as being very critical of the web design industry, and I don’t mean to be.

I do believe that most web designers and web design companies are gifted people and the web design community puts out more free resources than any other community I know of.

It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for textures, Photoshop brushes or WordPress themes, there are lots of freebies created and given away by web designers and web design companies all over the internet.

But all that doesn’t change my desire to point out what I feel is a bad design when I come across one however I also enjoy pointing out good designs.

This one was pointed out as being a really good design on another blog however, after checking out the site I was very disappointed, so much so that I had a desire to blog about it.

My problem started the second I landed on the site and couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do. And once I figured that out and entered the site it didn’t get any better.

Why do people build entrance pages that serve absolutely no use?

I would imagine this site loses half its traffic at the entrance page. The unlucky find their way into the site.

You can check out the site here.