Are you looking for an easy and cost-effective way to get your small business website up and running?  Or is it time to move that boring old brochure site to a snazzier Web 2.0 version.  If so, a great choice is to use a free WordPress-powered theme.

WordPress is not just for blogs anymore. With the growing number of premium (paid) and free WordPress themes, it’s easier than ever to build and manage your small business website.  And the best part…WordPress software is free.  Add to that a FREE WordPress theme, and the cost to develop and maintain your website just went way down!

The key to building and maintaining a great looking website is the “theme”. Themes are pre-built designs that control and organize the layout of your site.  Most themes can easily be customized to suit your style, with the addition of WordPress widgets and plugins.

Top Three WordPress Website Themes

Over 75 free themes were evaluated against the following criteria:  theme look and feel, theme pre-built functionality, theme developer and support. Following are the top three FREE small business WordPress themes that will help you easily create an amazing website!  

1. Notepad

The Notepad theme is a clean and crisp design that delivers high “visual” impact.  It’s a small business website that offers a BIG personal branding feel. The personal branding emphasis makes this theme a good match for freelancers of all occupations, personal coaches, consultants or other independent professionals.

It’s packed with great features like easy to follow navigation, a home page layout that you can customize, and an integrated blog.  Looking for just the right color to match your brand?  You’re bound to find a perfect match in one of the 13 amazing pre-built colors!

The theme was built by the crew that runs iThemes, a developer of premium (paid) WordPress themes.  If you visit their site you quickly get a sense that they know what they’re doing. So even though Notepad is free, you can be assured that it is a solid product.

They even offer a bit of support. As a courtesy to users of their free themes, they have a support board for community support.  Although they must devote their time to support of their paid themes, they try to also help out as time permits.

2.  Whitespace 

Whitespace is a simple, minimalist design that places the focus on what’s important…YOUR content!  It is a three column design with a central content column.  Both the right and left sidebars are widget ready, which makes this design incredibly easy to customize. It also has top horizontal navigation for your pages and a great footer.

The design flexibility of the Whitespace theme powered by WordPress functionality makes this a great template choice for just about any kind of small business.  The demo is content heavy, but that can easily be changed by adding photos and graphics to the content or sidebars.

Whitespace was created by Brian Gardner of Revolution Theme fame.  Visit his site and you will have complete confidence in the quality of Whitespace. 

There is no reference to support on the Whitespace demo page. You might need to rely on a bit of your own ingenuity to figure out how the theme works.  And for WordPress related questions you would utilize the excellent support forum at wordpress.org.

3.  Thematic

Thematic is a highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress theme framework!  Wow that’s a mouthful, but the theme must deliver as it has been downloaded over 18,800+ times! 

The theme has 3 pre-built designs including a two column with right or left sidebar and a three column option. It has 13 widget-ready areas that include the sidebar, footer and even between posts!

The simple clean style and huge design flexibility make it a great choice for small and medium sized businesses!  The demo is also content heavy, but the look and feel can easily be jazzed up with the addition of pictures, graphics and other options provided by widgets and plugins!

The theme was developed by Ian Stewart, a WordPress enthusiast turned theme developer. Although Thematic is free, you can find some support on the wordpress.org site. 

Thematic is listed in the themes category on  WordPress.org. If you click on Thematics, it will take you to the WordPress.org Thematics page!  Scroll down the page and you will find the latest support forum posts related to …yep you guessed it…the Thematics template!

Is This Tooooo Good to be True?

One last thing…does this all seem too good to be true…free software and free theme designs?  Here’s how it works and why it’s real!

Technical Support for WordPress Software

WordPress started in 2003 and is an opensource project.  This means that everyone from an individual to a Fortune 500 company can use WordPress without paying any licensing fees…in other words for Free.  Today WordPress is used on hundreds of thousands of sites and is worked on and supported by hundreds of people.

It continues and will continue to be supported and enhanced.  You will always be able to get WordPress support at the WordPress support forum.

Technical Support for Free WordPress Themes

WordPress themes are not part of the WordPress open source project.  They are developed by individual programmers and designers. In essence the developer is using WordPress as the backend and then writes a series of programs to create the front-end (what you see on the web).  And if the theme is offered for free, the author of the theme has no obligation to support it.  Although, as noted here, some do provide a bit of help. 

If you choose a free theme, it’s helpful to have some web design knowledge or have access to someone who does.  For the most part, the theme will run trouble free…but for those times when there is a problem it’s helpful to know how to trouble shoot the issue or who you can call to help!