Blogging is one the most popular activities online - it seems that everywhere you go, and every site you visit, there’s a blog in there, somewhere. Blogging is a great way to express yourself, and put your thoughts down to share with others, and if you’re using the popular website builder and optional web hosting solution that is WordPress, you’ll know it has a plethora of themes that cater to this specific activity. We’ve selected five we feel are definitely worth a look at if you’re thinking of venturing into this weird and wonderful world.
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Baskerville 2 is a good theme to get your started with blogging. You can add text, images and videos with ease, and create nice looking pages, even with the standard configuration. A custom menu is located just below the header, making it effortless to subdivide your blog into easy to navigate sections. As you’d expect for a modern theme, it’s fully responsive and looks great whichever screen it’s viewed on.
You can of course alter the theme to make it feel more unique to you, altering the background, changing colours, reveal the pages’ sidebar, choose from three different widgets for the footer, among others options. Baskerville 2 comes with three page templates. Galleries can be added, the header’s dimension altered, and you can also include add a site logo. Best of all, Baskerville 2 is free to use, which is perfect, especially if blogging is still a hobby for you - for now.
Another free option is Hemingway. This one’s a very simple theme with only a handful of customisation features, but its purpose is to display your blog in a clean manner, offering the reader a generous amount of white space. It’s responsive and retina-ready to ensure the best experience on any device, and has a customisable full-width header with support for parallax scrolling to make your page feel modern and fresh.
It comes with four post formats, depending on the content of the post itself (one with an image above the post, and one for short updates, for instance), and you can alter the accent colour if you’re not fond of the default green.
Although Hestia Pro is advertised as an ideal theme for one-page websites, it’s actually much more versatile than that. It’s designed to work well with blogs for instance, which is why it’s making the list. You can alter the design on the fly, and one of the features we liked was the ability to add parallax images or videos in the header, to make for a more visually striking website.
Customisation is impressive. You’re able to adjust each page’s section, for example, and choose different headers for each of them. There’s also a lot of versatility in its blogging options. To simplify matters, everything is centred around WordPress’ own Customiser but is also compatible with other page builders for greater customisation options.
Prices start at $69 for use on a single site, and include one year of support and updates. If you’d like to install this theme on additional sites, the Business option lets you do that for up to three of them, for $99. Agency, for $199, removes any such limits, and also includes live chats and priority support.
OceanWP is another blogging theme that advertises itself as being free, and in a way it is. The core functionality is. It’s a very popular WordPress theme, having been downloaded over 3.6 million times. It’s a fully responsive and retina-ready theme that caters to not just blogs - it’s currently pushing its e-commerce capabilities for instance. One of the great things about OceanWP is the number of Demos it has available - select the one you want to apply to your site in just a few clicks… except there’s a catch: the vast majority of them aren’t free. You will find the odd free demo, and all the ones we’ve seen are very nicely done, but if you’re itching for a “pro” one, you’ll have to hand out the cash.
Prices start at $39 per year for a single site, and comes with 12 premium extensions and 109 pro demos. If you work on more than one site, you can choose Business for 3 ($79 per year) or Agency for 25 ($129 per year). There’s also a one-off lifetime price if you hate subscriptions of $159, $319 and $519 respectively.
If all you’re focused on, is writing, and don’t care about stuff like images or video, then Typology could be the theme for you. Similar to Hemingway above, its focus is on creating a minimalist site to showcase your words above all else. But of course, you can also add images and video should you want to, which merely enriches the look of the page, rather than distract from it.
It comes with header options, multiple pagination choices, including infinite scrolling, and custom widgets (which reside in the sidebar). Typology also has multi-author post support, 404 page customization, and even e-commerce integration.
You can try all this for free for seven days, or take a look at some real-life examples on the company’s website, and if you like what you see, you can purchase it for $59, which includes future updates and six months of tech support (which can be increased by a further six months for $17.63).
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