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Top 5 Free WordPress Themes of the Month — April 2013 Edition

ManageWP Themes of the Month

This month has been a nightmare for me in terms of the Themes of the Month post, but fortunately for all the right reasons.

My first pass at stripping down my shortlist to a handful of contenders left me with no less than fourteen themes. Getting those fourteen down to five was extremely difficult. I am almost hopeful that next month is a poor one for theme development so I can feature more of these fantastic offerings then!

But let’s not think about that for the moment, because you’ve got a truly great selection to pore over right now. Enjoy!

5. Catch Everest

Catch Everest WordPress Theme

Catch Everest is a responsive and HTML5 and CSS3-compliant theme that could work for any number of sites. The home page features a prominent slider above the fold with thumbnail images and widgets below. The blog layout is an uncomplicated affair and it seems to me that it has been designed with tweaking in mind.

Catch Everest is developed by Catch Themes and as such comes packaged with their Theme Options panel, which you may be delighted to see (if you’re keen on easy customization) or indifferent to (if you like to get stuck into the code to customize your themes). Either way, this theme is a great option.

Demo / Download

4. Contango

Contango WordPress Theme

This is my favorite type of blog design — clean and boxy.

Contango is the kind of straightforward theme that makes it extremely easy for a user to navigate your site. Each element is clearly delineated from the next, leaving no doubt as to what leads where.

You can easily customize the header and background to give the theme a personal touch, and the nav bar is powered by a custom menu so you can use it to display whatever pages you would like. Built in pagination is a nice touch as that is something I believe should be built into the WordPress core. In many other months this theme would make it far higher than fourth place!

Download

3. Sensitive

Sensitive WordPress Theme

Sensitive is a fully responsive theme designed with the much-talked-about Twitter bootstrap. It features a subtle header and nav bar area and is dominated by a large feature image with accompanying text and button. below that you can have a number of pages and posts represented by a thumbnail image and short description.

This is a one of the best business/portfolio themes I have seen recently and would be amongst my first recommendations to people looking for this type of design.

Demo / Download

2. Chun

Chun WordPress Theme

I’m a big fan of Justin Tadlock’s work so I was eager to take a closer look at his most recent offering. I wasn’t disappointed.

Chun is a responsive HTML5 and CSS3-compliant blogging and portfolio theme. It supports all post formats (a feature that will be even more relevant with the release of WordPress 3.6) and offers a few customization options via the theme customizer.

It is a very simple theme, clearly designed with the intention of allowing the site author’s images to do the talking. If your site features imagery in any prominent way then Chun is an option worthy of serious consideration.

Demo / Download

 

1. Attitude

Attitude WordPress Theme

Finally we have a responsive theme that is touted as being retina ready (something I won’t complain about given that I am a MacBook Pro Retina owner).

The name of the game with Attitude is customization. The standard design is crisp and relatively minimalistic but you have a great deal of scope in terms of changing that. There are various layout options, custom page templates, widget areas (and custom widgets), social icons,  and much more. It also has been designed to support some of the best usability-boosting plugins out there: Breadcrumb NavXT, WP-PageNavi and Contact Form 7.

In short, it looks good and you can do a great deal with it to make the theme your own. Definitely a great option.

Demo / Download

Tom Ewer Avatar

16 responses

  1. John Saddington Avatar
    John Saddington

    good finds!

  2. Frank Steiner Avatar
    Frank Steiner

    Excellent list of free themes. Especially attitude seems to be very promising.

  3. Jared Avatar
    Jared

    I can’t wait until the company I’m a subcontractor for wises up to responsive themes. Working with fixed layouts is more of a pain in the ass than working with responsive themes (at least, in some ways).

  4. arun kumar Avatar
    arun kumar

    all themes are nice..but i like 5th theme

  5. ryditya909 Avatar
    ryditya909

    thanks for sharing themse, keep update;)

  6. toby Avatar
    toby

    Nice collections.Thanks.Attitude looks really good.Others are also not bad.Keep us posted with the best themes.Thanks again

  7. Igor Pisov Avatar
    Igor Pisov

    Great list of Themes, here is another one http://winithemes.com/blog/top-10-free-wordpress-themes-of-2013/

  8. vinay Avatar
    vinay

    Nice themes… liked 5th one 🙂

  9. Matt Avatar
    Matt

    Attitude looks great!

    I’m hoping that the generic business photos at the bottam of the demo page are a clever joke, made me laugh! 😀
    “Bank Note” “Business Break” “Corporate Buildings” “Business”

    Rofl!

  10. AldamaChess Avatar
    AldamaChess

    hi, im looking for, wordpress themes for classifieds ads
    thank you

  11. nics Avatar
    nics

    Great collection of themes. All the themes are nice I like them all specially Catch Everest theme.

  12. wpflame Avatar
    wpflame

    Attitude looks nice.

  13. John Avatar
    John

    great templates!!! I found few not bad templates here http://responsive-websites.info/. Anybody know some cool sites with free responsive templates?

  14. Philip Avatar
    Philip

    I quite like the theme called “Chun” developed by Justin Tadlock. I want to use it but it is not convenient for me to have the following information:
    Copyright © 2013 Chun Theme. Powered by WordPress and Chun.
    However, I have no issue if such information inserted in the source. My question is if I am I allowed to remove it from the front end? Please advise. Thank you. Philip

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