Time has come to upgrade my personal blog to have a clean and responsive WordPress theme. I’ve been hunting for a good responsive WordPress theme for my personal blog for long time and hunt still continues.
Being a perfectionist I don’t settle with anything which is less than perfect and hence I’ve not yet come across any perfect responsive WordPress theme.
While my search continues I decided to post a review of the best responsive WordPress themes as one page repository of all of the best responsive WordPress themes for personal blog.
I’m going to select one of these themes for this very own blog sometimes later.
Why responsive WordPress theme?
Responsive themes are the trend now a days thanks to the ever increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets. More and more people are accessing web via their smartphones and tablets and I’m no exception.
The beauty of responsive themes is that you need to have only one website (design and code) and it can adapt itself to various screen sizes without doing any extra work. Sounds like a perfect solution isn’t it?
Well yes responsive theme is the ultimate solution for solving the problems for creating a website for mobile devices.
But it comes with a cost. There are some compromises to be made with the elements which you can not easily have in a responsive theme. The first thing you will notice is that you will have to forget about ubiquitous 728×90 leaderboard banner which majestically sits at the top of almost every website. If you go through these responsive themes below you will find that this banner is missing in all of these themes.
Most of the themes which I’ll review below are premium themes which is obvious as no designer will put so much effort to create a theme to release it for free.
Sensational
Price: $35 Download
I just discovered this responsive theme today while stumbling in StumbleUpon and it caught my attention. This theme is a perfect theme which I’ve been looking for. It has got nice top level navigation, right column and footer widgets. Font type and colours also look good.
There are few features which I don’t like in this theme. The first feature is the left column which is not my style. But this could be also a blessing in disguise if your personal blog has a lot of categories as mine has. But still I would rather not have a left column.
Another feature I don’t like is that they have given too less space in the header. I prefer to have 2 level of navigation and obviously a space for leaderboard banner.
However all of the above shortcomings can be easily fixed with some tweaking.
After going through all these themes and more I finally decided to use use this theme on my blog.
DailyJournal
Price: $39 Download
I again found this theme on someone’s else blog while stumbling on StumbleUpon and it caught my attention immediately. In it’s native form the theme doesn’t look good specially the font types are not good. You need to tweak theme to change the theme and colours to make it look kool.
Notes
Price: $39 Download
Themify has some of the best collection of responsive theme for business sites but not for personal blogs. I could find 2 themes which can be classified as good responsive themes but unfortunately they are not of my type. Worth checking them out though.
Minblr
Price: $39 Download
Minblr is similar in layout to the Notes.
Arcadia
Price: $40 Download
This is another good responsive theme which can be used for both personal and magazine. It’s boxy so it might be an ideal choice for personal blog. Also width is less so it’s not the optimum utilization of full width.
Elemin
Price: $39 Elemin
This is another nice box theme which can be used for either personal blog or magazine.
WP-Critique
Price: $59 WP-Critique
This is another nice box style theme. The layout is great, except that it is boxy, but the black colour sucks and the top black background header needs to come off. If you can tweak these 2 shortcoming then it could be a very good theme for personal blog.
Free Themes
Montezuma
Price: Free Download
I’m yet to come across a good free responsive theme for personal blogs. The closest best is Montezuma. It’s a new approach but there a lot of features missing from this theme.
I’ve installed this theme on Web Design Blog and still trying to figure out how to get best out of this theme.
There are many problems with this theme.
The first noticeable problem is that you will always see the horizontal scroll bar. Next problem is that author meta is missing from single post. Tags are above the post body. Breadcrumb shows up just below navigation which should be used for secondary level navigation.
If you can tweak and fix the problems then this theme could be an ideal choice for a personal blog.
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