Today as I got back from my vacation, I was reading ProBlogger like usual and saw a post where Darren was asking which wordpress themes are the best ones that users prefer. Basically everyone’s favorite themes. I just wrote a short response there, but then decided to make a good list of the ones that I like so my users can use those.

Before I start displaying the list, I like to mention that the best Wordpress themes are the ones that are custom created because that adds unique identity to your blog. So if you want the best for your blog, consider a custom created blog theme. If you need help finding a designer do check out my designing portfolio for blog and web designs.

List of Excellent Wordpress Themes that I like:

iTheme – (View Demo)

Blogging Pro’s Theme – (View Demo)

The Morning After – (View Demo)

WP-Polaroid – (View Demo)

Live Green – (View Demo)

Neoclassical Theme

Thesis Wordpress Theme

Cutline Theme for Wordpress

Ext JS Wordpress Theme

Aspire Theme – (View Demo)

Margot Theme

Structure Wordpress Theme

Visionary Wordpress themes

Revolution Themes – Premium Theme with great collection. ($79.95)

Portfolio Press – ($49)

Premium News Themes – Prices Varies.

These are the themes that I liked alot over the web that I can find for wordpress. Ofcourse like I said the best ones are the custom ones. Maybe I might make some premium magazine style themes in the future when I get time. I am mostly loaded with contracts.

Enjoy the list of excellent free and premium wordpress themes.

When I first started Balkhis, I wrote about Creating your own Custom wordpress page in which I discussed two ways to making a custom wordpress homepage, but I only shared one method of making a custom blog page and that was through the WP-admin method.

I recommend the users to read the post I just linked to above before continue reading this one because you won’t get lost if you read that post first.

Well, sometimes you might not want to use the WP-Admin functions to set custom homepage and separate blog page. Therefore you will go ahead and use what I called the Raw Code method to make a homepage.

<br /> <?php<br /> $homepage = get_settings('siteurl')."/";<br /> global $wp; $wp_received_argument = false;<br /> foreach ($wp->query_vars as $k=>$v) if ($v) $wp_received_argument = true;<br /> if ($wp_received_argument) {<br /> include(TEMPLATEPATH . “/index.php”);<br /> } else { ?></p> <p>Here is whatever you can put any html code you like.</p> <p><?php } ?></p> <p>

Now you want to make a blog page, so in this post I will be sharing the codes to display your posts in wordpress through RAW Codes.

Basically just copy and paste the codes below in your page-blog.php or whatever you want to call that file.

<?php $page = (get_query_var(‘paged’)) ? get_query_var(‘paged’) : 1; query_posts("showposts=15&paged=$page"); while ( have_posts() ) : the_post() ?>

Change the 15 to whatever you like and it will be the number of posts shown on that page. Now you need to follow rest of the index.php settings to align the posts and all the good stuff.

I will put an example of a text file that you can use:

<br /> <?php $page = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1; query_posts("showposts=5&paged=$page"); while ( have_posts() ) : the_post() ?></p> <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>“></p> <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2> <div class="entry"><?php the_excerpt(); ?><br /> <b><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”>Read The Full Post about <?php the_title(); ?> by clicking here.</a></b></p></div> </div> <p> <?php endwhile; ?></p> <p>

The above page should do the job well. Now you have the code to display latest posts on any page of your blog by just adding a simple .php file.

Making Design usually is not hard, but making nice design is a task that not everyone can do. One of the most important features of a nice designs is a cool logo. For a cool logo, you need a cool font. Well in this post, I will share some of the useful fonts to create logos. These fonts are the ones that I tend to see myself using alot. But before I present to you my list, I would like to explain what I consider a decent logo.

My definition of a Decent Logo is:

- One that blends in with the theme, yet is astonishing.
- Readable, and Clean
- Creative and Good Looking

Well to fit in the guidelines, I can suggest you some of the fonts that I use alot to make logos that looks good. I have downloaded these fonts over a long period of time. This is a good source for web designers specially the new ones who are entering the industry. The list is not in any specific order, so don’t think the first one is the best one.

Cicle – 7 Font Files – Freeware

Existence – 3 Font Files – Freeware

Diavlo – This is the font that I use for Balkhis Logo.

Delicious – Another cool font.

Fontin-Sans – Last one in my cool listing.

These fonts are the ones that I use in almost all of my posts other than some premium ones which I downloaded for free in their promotional moments. The ones above described are freeware which means free for both personal and commerical use. These were mostly found from Smashing Magazine Posts.

Well while surfing websites like I normally do every day, I found a banner on one site which said 15000 free icons. At first, I thought this might be shady, but can’t hurt to check it out. What you know it wasn’t. This is a real site with 15,000 royalty free icons and stock images for web designs. So if you want all 15,000 you should head over to Free Icons Download.com, or you can stay on this page and see the kool looking ones that I like and download these first and then go to that site and download the rest if you like.

Basically the way this site got their icons is the original Icon authors submitted their icons set on this site to get more publicity, so if you are an icon designer feel free to head over and submit your icons as well. You will get more downloads…

System Icons
contains 66 icons in the set (256 x 256px) all in .png format.

Business Icons
contains 25 icons in the set for your web site and applications. These icons are free for personal,non-commercial use.

I have a big collection on the full post page, so see the full post to see my favorite ones…..

I remember seeing the earlier websites when I was very young. Most of those websites had repeatable tile background. Which in most cases looked pretty darn ugly. Well looks like now most designers are turning back to a retro look of the design and some are even coming back with their repetitive background designs and purely web 2.0. I know most of the design requests that I am getting now are people asking that their websites to be web 2.0, and Half of those people don’t even know what Web 2.0 is when they first ask me. Maybe it is just a hype right now that people wanting such designs.

Well in this post, I am asking my users what do they prefer? A more techy looking website, or a more simplistic retro style website? I will find about what my users prefers, but I know that most designers and their clients are liking retro style because css collection sites are now getting more and more entries of websites with such style. I think Gone are the days of the techy complicated designs.

I just spent a few minutes and there were too many examples to pick from. I picked these ones because they clearly demonstrate the use of retro/web 2.0 designs.

An extremely nice looking website featuring wooden repeatable background.

Active web directory is a true example of simplicity and beauty.

… [More is in the free post, and it also include some freebies. You should check it out]