It’s February 5th and what’s more important than the Super Bowl?  WordPress!  Ok, not really, but WordPress is a pretty big deal everyday.  Today I want to write about WordPress templates.  One if the biggest benefits of using the WordPress platform is the easiness of swapping between different templates.  A template is basically a skin to a website that gives a website a different look a feel.  This may includes the color tones, graphics, layout, and effects.  Your content such as verbiage, images that are not part of the actual layout, and everything else that has nothing to do with the layout will not be effected by a skin change.  Here are a few sites to get awesome free website templates.

Template Lite – One of my favorite place for free professional WordPress template.  Plenty to choose from and an I’m still amazed that these are free.   Limited to certain niches but if it works our for your brand or audience, this place is a home-run.

InstantShift– This is a blog post of tons of free WordPress templates to choose from.  A must visit!

WP Template & WP Archive – These are not as good as the first two in terms of overall quality, but they are worth a look.  A lot of them are hit or miss.

Pro Blog Design and 1st Web Designer – Worth a look.

WordPress Official Theme Repository – Name says everything.  Definitely check it out.  It’s the one officially hosted by Automatic, the people who brought you WordPress.

For quality premium templates, I highly recommend Theme Forest, an industry leader in premium WordPress templates.  Theme Forest offer hundreds of high quality themes that you’ll bound to find one that will fit your needs.  Thry break out their themes into categories such as non-profit, corporate, retail, entertainment, personal, etc..  In addition to just WordPress themes, Theme forest also has themes to WordPress plugins such as Buddy Press and WP-ECommerce.

Note that although this post is about WordPress templates, Theme Forest also sells themes for other CMSes such as Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Spotify, OpenCart, and so forth.

Most themes are competitively priced at under $40.

In addition to ThemeForest.com I also recommend Woo Themes and Elegant Themes as well.  These two theme vendors offer more than just a template that just “skins” your website.  They offer functionality and really nice interface tools to make customization to the themes.  While some themes are rigid and doesn’t offer a lot of customization in terms of colors, look, and feel, Woo Themes and Elegant Themes do a fantastic job at making flexible template design and tools.