I’m usually not one to pay for WordPress themes, but the pool of free themes is rather boring and overused, and I don’t have the time to design custom themes for all of my blogs. I always use my own themes for my personal domain, jenn.nu, but for others I will often take advantage of pre-mades. Many people, both personal blog owners and commercial site owners, take advantage of pre-mades. I have already seen recipe blogs, identity theft protection companies and even debt consolidation companies use pre-made themes on their WordPress-powered blogs.

Anyway, I recently paid for a subscription to Elegant Themes. I was enticed by their Glow theme, which on its own is definitely worth $20 or more. They have several themes, and it seems as though they add new themes often, so there’s always a varied selection to choose from. Glow is definitely a popular theme. I’ve seen it in use on kallure.com and caity.nu, which is how I first discovered it and found out about Elegant themes!

I get this question a lot, as I’m sure many other bloggers do. Well, my answer to this question is that with the exception of In My Bag and kitty.nu, the themes on my websites were all made by me. It takes a lot of time, and coming up with creativity is priceless, but I am proud to say that I put a lot of effort into creating nice WordPress themes that are [mostly] CSS & XHTML valid.

But for those of you who don’t know how to make your own themes, or simply aren’t interested in making your own themes, I recommend you check out the following free WordPress theme sources:

• woothemes.com
• wpthemespress.com
• themetation.com
• freewpthemes.net
• wpskins.org
• topwpthemes.com

wpzoom.com and wphacks.com also have huge lists of free and premium WordPress themes that are worth checking out.

And as always, you can take the time to learn how to make your own WordPress theme.

I take pride in creating my own WordPress themes from scratch. The theme on this site was created by me, as are all of the themes on my personal blog, jenn.nu. A few of my other blogs are currently sporting pre-made WordPress themes, but that’s only for the sake of convenience.

You may be interested in making your own WordPress theme, but do you know where to start? I can tell you from experience that the easiest way to learn how to make your own theme is to take the time to study existing themes and tweak them to perfection. But before you head for the nearest exit signs, you can also use various tutorials that are floating around on the internet. One such tutorial that is worth checking out can be found at eruanna.net. Her tutorial, How to write your own wordpress theme, walks you through the creation of a theme from start to finish.

Enjoy!