Home Office Organization–21st Century Style

Mango Orange iThemes for WordPress

I have tried a lot of free WordPress themes. I am pretty happy with the theme on this site. It is called “News Blue” if you are curious. I like this theme for this blog. But finding good free themes can be a chore, especially when you want something simple yet elegant in one color that has plenty of arrangement options, like two-columns or three-columns, and the ability to decide where each column goes without having to mess with the code.

The main reason for such a spartan theme is to make the focus of the blog the content by not cluttering up the blog with a bunch of theme elements. You may not want to go the route of using the default, Kubrick WordPress theme that all WordPress blogs start with because that one is too plain and screams “I did not take the time to pick a theme yet”. You can change the header color and the header text color easily with Kubrick, but the sidebar is fixed on the right unless you know your way around php and css.

There are sets of two-column and three-column “Mac” themes by Mango Orange that are really clean and easy to use. The two-column themes, or i2Themes, have a main column for posts and a sidebar. You can choose either a left or right sidebar. The three-column themes, or i3Themes, allow you to choose both sidebars on the left, one on the left and one on the right, or both on the right.

The colors for both the two-column and three-column themes are classic (medium blue), grassy green, midnight blue, ruby red, and snazzy pink. I would like for them to come out with a white on black and a black on white with gray-scale. I’m not sure what I would use them for, but I think they would be fantastic for a black-and-white photography site or something.

I currently have four i3Themes in use: classic blue, grassy green, midnight blue and snazzy pink. I went with the right sidebars on all but one. The blog with the midnight blue theme has a left and right sidebar with blog posts in the middle.

The themes are Apple Mac-like in look. The header is clean, the text is easy to read, changing the header text is easy, you can decide where you want each column, and the page bar at the top of the first post on the page is really well organized. Parent pages only show up on the main page bar. Once you click on a page other than the home page, you can see all child pages of that parent page across the top under the main page bar. If you put a pages widget in one of your sidebars, the parent pages are bulleted with orange dots and the child pages are indented and bulleted with theme color dots.

These themes are just plain clean, easy and elegant with lots of choices to customize them as you want without digging into any code. You can view samples and download these themes from Mango Orange. I hope you’ll check these out and perhaps give one of them a go when you need a simple theme with lots of pizazz.

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