10 Ugly WordPress Themes
I've been looking a lot at WordPress themes recently, and it never ceases to amaze me that so many people are giving away such incredibly good design work. We're lucky to be part of this community. But then there are always the ones where you think, what were they on? What were they thinking of? Inevitably, that's a personal thing: someone reading this will be thinking that this blog is a whole bunch uglier than the ten ugly themes on my list...
10 Jakobian is based on the site of usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Less ugly than just plain dull, I'd say: there are plenty of uglier themes out there.
9 Desk Mess I have a messy desk on my desk: I don't need another one on my blog. The dried-up lemon tea is particularly nasty.
8 Happy Valentino It's pink, it has a soppy looking couple in the header, and it celebrates Hallmark-holiday-for-idiots, Valentine's Day. Need I say more.
7 Kitten in Pink. Seriously, dude, what were you thinking? The 'oil painting' effect on the kitten is what really clinches it for this one.
6 Digg-theme. Why would you do this? It would be amusing for about five seconds to have your blog look like Digg. Then it would be just - you know - stupid. Added points for being a premium (i.e. pay-for) theme.
5 Wood Magazine. I really dislike wood-effect themes; this one scores particularly highly for having three different wood effects in one theme.
4 AniGirl. The pink girl and the odd background texture aren't doing it for me at all, but what's most disturbing about this theme is the vastly overweight dog. Why?
3 Retro. Green on black was horrible when we had to use it for work. Let's not go back there.
2 RetroMacOS. Another 'let's not go back there': the pixellated background makes my eyes hurt. I know it was made as a bit of a joke, but really, Stuart, you needn't have bothered.
1 Kubrick What can we say about Kubrick? It's the WordPress default, and it's dull. Very, very dull. Using Kubrick on your blog says "I can't be bothered", and "I have no imagination", and "I can't even type 'free wordpress themes' into Google". It's horrible, so unless you have a burning desire to look like three million other blogs out there, please change it. (You lose extra points if you've changed the header colour, in an attempt to look different. Really, it doesn't work.)
Tags: Kubrick, themes, ugly, WordPress
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My vote goes to 4.
dog needs the same diet as me, and why is Pink-girl cross-eyed?
Surely a theme for seriously design-challenged 14 year old girls?
Digg theme is exceptionally pointless. I expect it took *ages* to get it looking just so.
dw
Mmmm, was just going to ask you how to change my cogno blue theme to something a bit different (cos it looks too much like Kubrick) when I saw this post *cringe*.
Can I add to the list of excuses that I am too stupid to know how to do it?
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Blogsprog, we both know that you are *not* too stupid
Short version of how to do it:
1) find the new theme you want
2) upload via ftp to wp-content/themes
3) activate new theme via wp-admin
4) sit back and admire new prettiness
Longer version of how to do it:
http://blogmum.com/2008/11/the-normal-persons-guide-to-wordpress-themes/
If stuck, Skype me
But find the theme you want to use first; that link above has a few places to start looking.
Well, I changed the template twice and each has it’s problems, the first had a spelling mistake on the ’search’ that said ’serarch’ and I decided after a week I didn’t like it anyway.
So this one now I’ve liked form the start but it has now called my blog Ambient Glo after the template name and I haven’t the 1st clue how to change it.
I’ve been scanning through the ‘edit theme’ pages trying to find where the title is, I’ve taken the title out altogether and put it back in but it still says Ambient Glo!
I really like this theme and I really want it, help!
Please
Managed to change the Ambient glo to my logo, made a little change and now it is an empty box with the word logo on it, I don’t know what I did but can’t remember where to put it after the upload to ftp, it is in the images folder of themes in ambient glo but I’ve obviously done something wrong :-S
So, for the sake of completeness, I’ll just mention here that file names and extensions are case-sensitive: .jpg and .JPG are different
Personally I think retro looks great, I still use green on black today and its far easier on the eyes than black on white.
I’m astonished to see that #2 is being used by the lovely Robert Llewellyn:
http://www.llewtube.com/