At the end of 2009, we published a series of posts highlighting the best freebies and resources from that year. It turned out to be a great way to show our readers what they may have missed, and to give some recognition to the people that worked very hard at producing such amazing stuff. It’s difficult to believe that another year is drawing to a close, but here we are at the end of 2010. This means it’s time for another “Best Of” series. So to kick it off, we’ve rounded up the best free WordPress themes of 2010. These are in no particular order. They’re simply the ones we felt stood out from the rest this year in terms of design quality and features.
Shaken Grid
This theme is perfect for you if you’re in need of a gallery/portfolio website or if you just want a website with a unique grid layout that not many websites have taken full advantage of yet. “Shaken Grid” uses the jQuery Masonry plugin which “arranges elements vertically then horizontally according to a grid.”
Imbalance
Imbalance is a very user friendly, jQuery powered theme which looks really well under any browser and OS. Perfectly fits for your blog, online magazine or portfolio websites.
Boldy – download
Boldy is a high-quality theme and features an image slider predominantly on the homepage.
Mansion
Mansion is a free photoblogger’s theme for WordPress. It features a flexible-width thumbnail grid for both images and photo journal entries. Mansion is perfect for those who want to primarily showcase their photographs and occasionally write blog posts.
Simplefolio
SimpleFolio is a portfolio theme that includes a blog and a very extensive option page that allows you to exclude all your portfolio items from the blog page. It also includes a front page slider.
Blissful Blog
The Blissful Blog is a WordPress 3.0 theme for the wedding industry. It features a traditional blog layout with several added features that take advantage of the latest WordPress 3.0 platform.
Simplo – download
Simplo, as its name implies, is a simplistic twist on our premium themes by offering a simplified look and feel. Simplo works straight “out of the box” and features six color options configurable within the theme’s options page.
Structure
Structure is designed to adopt the style of the content added. It features 2 color options — a white version and a black version.
AutoFocus+
AutoFocus+ is a clean and simple WordPress theme developed for photographers looking to showcase their work.
Koi
Koi is an artistic theme and is suitable for most personal blogs. Koi is one of the top used themes on WordPress.com. The theme supports the WordPress 3.0 new features such as custom menus and child themes but is still backwards compitable with older versions of WordPress.
Skeptical
Skeptical’s layout is very flexible in the sense that you can display “related posts” next to your latest posts on the home page, OR have a completely widgetized sidebar. Not only that, you can also add your Flickr stream to the footer region and showcase three noteworthy blog posts tagged with a specific tag that you declare in the theme options.
Peacekeeper
Peacekeeper is the gamer niche wordpress theme from web2feel.com. This is a stylish theme with a 3D flash image slider, Twitter, Banner ads, Adsense, etc.