It always seems a daunting task when starting out with a new blog- first impressions are so important, so where can you find that perfect theme which isn’t the same as everyone else? Prepare for some window shopping because I’m going to give you a list of my favourite places to find free wordpress themes.

• http://www.wpthemesfree.com/ - This website has a few thousand free wordpress themes, with a couple of new ones added every day. There’s bound to be something remotely suitable in here, and to make it even more useful there’s a nifty search option in the right hand column. You can search by category, or if you have something specific in mind you can also search by colour, columns, sidebar location or a handful of other features.

• Bloggeries theme section has a selection of themes by a few rather unrecognised designers. Some of them are truly beautiful (a personal favourite of mine is the scroll layout, if only it matched what I’m about!), and because they’re a less commonly used source, it’s unlikely you’ll bump into someone with an identical theme. Please do me a small favour though, if you’re going to sign up to Bloggeries please do so with this link: CLICK. It gives me credit for referring you.

• Slider v3 is the most customisable template I have found, and as such I felt it deserved a special mention. It has an in-built, incredibly easy menu to edit the theme, and allows you to alter header height, sidebar width, sidebar location, which posts are open or closed, completely redesign your colour scheme and icons you use. The default settings are quite plain, but here are two examples of what you can do with this theme; Example#1 & Example#2. Did I mention the rotating header script comes with it? I have now!

• For those of you that are cleverer than I, there is a Wordpress Theme Generator here: http://www.yvoschaap.com/wpthemegen/ but I myself just aren’t clever enough to make anything spectacular with it.

Google will give you thousands or results for ‘free wordpress themes’, and many of them are quite good. When choosing a theme, check to see whether you have permission to edit any part of it, such as changing the header or colour scheme. If you can, then that gives you another degree of personalisation to your favourite theme.

Just be sure to leave the designer’s links (and their sponsor’s) in the footer. They deserve their credit for giving you the free theme.