These days it’s not enough to have a beautifully designed website, especially if you’re a photographer, artist or graphic designer. These days if your site isn’t responsive, chances are you’re losing a significant part of your audience who tend to do most of their surfing on smartphones or tablets.
Responsive designs, for those of you who don’t know, are designs that automatically adapt and scale themselves to suit whatever machine or browser your visitors happen to be using – meaning that whether they’re browsing from the comfort of a desktop computer or laptop, or down to a small 4 inch smartphone screen – your website will optimize itself to display your blog posts, photos, or whatever else you happen to share, beautifully.
For no one is this more important than the visual creator. For that reason, we’ve put together a list of a few pretty slick responsive, free WordPress themes that are 100% free, so you can make sure that no matter what device your visitors happen to be using, they can still take in your beautiful photos, and interact with your website just as easily as if they were using their desktop computers.
Simple Photo
Simple Photo comes to us courtesy of Dessign, a gorgeous repository of minimal WordPress themes designed by Marios Lublinski. Dessign will make you feel spoiled rotten with an impressive selection of both free and premium themes, many of which are responsive.
One of our favourites is Simple Photo – a minimal design which puts the focus where it belongs – on your photos. With Simple Photo, you can also keep a blog, and share links to your social media accounts.
Spun
For those of you who are looking for a theme to do nothing more than show your images, in a classy and unique way – Spun is the theme for you. With this Tumblr-esque theme your images are displayed in row upon row of black and white images. As its designer Caroline Moore says “Spun is a clean, lightweight, responsive theme that steps out of the way to put the focus on your content.”
All the navigation controls remain greyed out until you hover over them. And while Spun really is the kind of theme that comes to life with image-centric posts, there’s no reason you can’t use it to share the occasional text blog post as well.
Touchfolio
Touchfolio is a stunning near-full screen theme which lets you display your photos in all their glory. Another simple and somewhat minimalist theme – available in both light and dark colours – allows you to create a slick gallery of your photos. Visitors can use the left and right keyboard arrows to quickly navigate from one photo to the next. Touchfolio switches easily from one gallery to the next, by using the up and down arrow keys.
GridPhoto
GridPhoto is an interesting responsive photography theme that will come in handy if you want to accompany your photos with a lot of text. The demo demonstrates the many different ways you can share your photography – whether using the WordPress native gallery feature, or inserting photos in line with text.
The home page, however, is a grid of photos so that the first thing your visitors will always see are your photos.
Ascetica
If you’re looking for a more elaborate and robust option for your blogging and portfolio needs, Ascetica is an interesting option. The theme allows you to put both your blogging and your photography front and center on your home page. The portfolio section comes packed with several different ways to display your photography.
Gridly
Looking for a simple way to organize your work into a series of portfolios? Look no further than Gridly. The free responsive theme displays your images in a grid that adjusts to your screen, and features a simple menu at the top of the page to navigate from one collection to another.
Not a fan of WordPress but still want a responsive website? Be sure to check out Striking.ly as an alternative.
Do you know of any great responsive WordPress themes? Let us know about them in the comments.
0 comments:
Post a Comment