New theme: Seared by Free Blog Themes

Here’s another simple yet (largely) effective theme. When I’m looking for a new theme to try out here I keep shying away from the more ’specific’ ones – by that, I mean the ones that are very, very particular in that they might include either a design that imposes itself all over your content, or perhaps a whacking great image to represent the theme name. Something like ‘HORROR’ or ‘KITTENS’. I’m yet to fully get my head around the point of these kind of themes; although perhaps that’s the sniffy designer in me, in that I don’t like the idea of somebody else plastering their ideas of what’s an interesting style all over my writings. I much prefer this kind of theme, as it doesn’t do much except complement the content, with a few nice touches to bring things out and reduce the need for me to build a simple template from scratch. Some of the nice touches on this theme are, I think:

• The styling of the dates, in the ‘diary tab’ format down the side
• The exceptionally subtle background image which is like a very muted Indian restaurant wallpaper from the 1970s. (Would’ve loved the image to be fixed rather than scroll with the content, though…)
• The cheeky little off-kilter RSS feed link up there on the top right. Slightly incongruous perhaps, but effective nonetheless
• The subtle fade within the header.

Might have been nice, though, to have a more substantial footer in the theme, and perhaps more styling of the comment form to lift it out of being just a transparent rectangle.

I downloaded the theme from Templates Free, a somewhat clunky-looking theme repository of which there seem to be several billion on the internet right now. (Search for ‘Free WordPress themes’ and you’ll see what I mean). Why so many? Can’t there just be one? Does the internet always have to have so damned much content?! I guess everybody’s after the ‘Ads by Google’ dollars…