Name change and some recommended free WordPress themes

I decided to change my website name to the url of my site Linearseat.net. I noticed that there were quite a few sites with the word “Librarian” in it and I just didn’t feel like calling myself the Linearseat Librarian. Actually I visited a few librarian blogs and I thought they were all too academic and scholarly, especially the ones with presentation slideshows, and their unfascinating thoughts on library issues. I also visited two male librarian pages and they both had the DIYthemes Thesis WordPress theme. I guess they are seriously into blogging since they plunked down money on a theme that claims to be extremely customizable and SEO optimized. It seems a lot of people have bought that theme.

Here are two WordPress themes that I like and am currently using.

1. Swifthemes http://swiftthemes.com/
This theme is very simple to use and offers many fancy features. I don’t believe it’s extremely fast, but it’s probably fast enough for most people as the name claims itself to be swift. It has an easy to use theme option selection where you can customize colors visually and insert advertisements or adsense code in the most common advertisement placement areas of a webpage. There also is the option to have the blog frontpage be in magazine or traditional blog format. Customized menus can be created above or below the title along with inserting a background image. This theme is highly recommended for beginners who don’t know how to customize themes manually.

2. Thematic http://themeshaper.com/thematic/
This second theme is also highly customizable, but only for those who know how to use css and html. It also has child themes created by other users, which are easily downloaded and loaded into WordPress just like any other theme, but the original Thematic theme must be installed for them to work. The author encourages users to create their own child themes using CSS and their is a forum dedicated to assisting users customize Thematic for their own purposes. Right now it is primarily a 2 column theme with a 3 column version in the works.