themes
12 Cheap WordPress Themes for Developers on a Budget
Happy New Year! The gifting season is over, and we are left with a limited budged. Let’s see what useful WordPress themes we can get with the little we have still left. 🙂
Not everyone has huge budgets when putting together websites–even if they make websites for a living. That’s why cheap WordPress themes are so important. They give developers, designers, and business owners a solid place to get started without having to fork over a ton of cash. And you know what? There are some really awesome cheap themes out there that will give your site a professional appearance without skimping on features.
The key is to know where to look. We’ve put together a nice list of cheap WordPress themes that offer a well-rounded set of features, stylish design elements, and a reasonable price tag that’s certain to fit into your budget. Enjoy!
Cascade – Personal vCard WordPress Theme
Cascade is a $34 vCard theme for displaying your portfolio, resume, and business information. It has a minimalistic design focused around colored vertical menu tabs, each of which extends into its respective page with an animated transition. The theme comes with a dark and a light skin, and the tabs are highly customizable, with unlimited numbers of tabs and several predefined colors, icons, and page backgrounds, as well as social media icons and the ability to use custom backgrounds as well. It’s jQuery powered for ease of use, along with a built-in lightbox, contact form, latest tweets widget, Google Map shortcode, and other such features. Overall Cascade is a clean and well laid out theme for anyone looking to make a website for their portfolio.
Me – OnePage Portfolio
Me is a one-page responsive layout theme, designed with the user experience and ease of use in mind. It’s a portfolio based theme with filterable Quicksand plugin powered elements, editable categories, and five different thumbnail shapes to choose from. The thumbnails can display extra articles, images, Youtube or Vimeo videos, or sliders without needing a page reload thanks to Ajax loading. It’s cross-browser compatible and fully translation ready to make your page available from anywhere.
There are over 70+ fonts included to give you a wide range of options, as well as several options for your contact forms through full Contact Form 7 support and an included customizable Ajax contact form. It has retina ready graphics to keep your site looking great, and supports full width background images, as well as retina ready background patterns included. At $34, Me is a sleek, flexible theme for a site about exactly what the name would suggest: Yourself and your work.
Dotfolio- Creative Portfolio for Creative People
DotFolio is a portfolio theme for creative professionals. It’s built to have a unique interactive navigation, as well as a modern feel and clean layout. It’s fully responsive, retina ready, and easily customizable, all built on the Bootstrap Framework. The designers took care to make sure the code was well organized and well commented to make your work easier. It comes with tons of Font Awesome icons, and with Google Fonts you can easily get access to over 600 fonts to use.
Also included is a built-in contact form with validator. It comes with all the animated transitions and filterable portfolio features you’d expect from a premium portfolio theme, and at only $17 it makes a great choice for anyone wanting a unique yet still clean and modern look for their creative portfolio.
Cosmopolitan
CosmoMagazine is a theme designed around building an online magazine. It has a news focus, but it comes with enough functionality and customization options to cover magazines of nearly any kind. At a price tag of only $1, this theme barely counts as a premium theme at all, but with no lack of features to show for it. It includes drop down menus, featured posts, related posts and even a breaking news feature to display selected articles right at the top for the first 24 hours after posting.
These features make it excellent at maintaining a large number of articles across a wide variety of categories while keeping it all well organized. It has a custom sidebar for exactly the kind and number of posts you want it to display. It comes with a Twitter widget to show your latest tweets as well, along with the full list of standard features from CosmoThemes, such as custom shortcodes and page templates, cross-browser compatibility, custom menu management, and a backend panel for ease of customization, and more. A feature rich theme for an incredibly low price, CosmoMagazine is a great theme for any news site or online magazine.
Metro.press – Expressive WordPress Theme
Metro.Press is a responsive theme with a very high degree of customizability. It comes with nine color and style variations, with several other options such as multiple included side and bottom bars to chose from and tweak to your liking. The theme is fully resizable as well, giving you further control, and comes with a large number of typography options too. It also comes with a page profile features that allows you to create and save different styles and layouts, giving you the ability to create varied aesthetics for each section of your site.
It’s powered by Warp Framework and Widgetkit, which gives you access to several powerful widgets, like lightboxes, slideshows, Twitter integration, and a media player. To top it all off, it’s also SEO friendly, fully localized, and tested across all modern browsers. One of the most flexible budget themes you’ll find, at only $34, this theme makes a strong choice for almost any type of website.
WordPress For Writers
WordPress For Writers is a $34 theme for writers of all kinds. It’s built from the ground up for that purpose, creating a clean and beautiful layout for you to leave your time free for writing, and providing features such as shortcodes for citation links and article series. Article series allow you to break your post down not only by tags and categories, but also into specific series that go together instead of having the same general topic, with automatic links at the bottom of one article to the next in the series. The post editor also includes shortcodes for layouts, gallery, buttons, and audio. It supports multiple authors with separate profile images and settings for each.
Buttons at the sides of the articles allow your visitors easy scrolling through all your work, and a tweet button makes sharing your work easy. There are two page templates to use, home and archive, with their own widgets, and simple comments on every article to help you get easy feedback that can be turned off if preferred. WordPress For Writers is a great theme to showcase your written work and help your visitors find exactly the articles they need.
Libra 3.0 – Minimal Responsive WP Theme
Libra 3.0 is a minimal and responsive theme designed for flexibility. It has four different portfolio templates, and a front page template with a built-in slider, five different sidebars, custom post types for sliders, features, and social icons, and a contact form already included. It has full customizability with an unlimited color theme, access to a background library as well as the ability to use custom background images for both the main site and a separate one for the footer.
Shortcodes are included for videos, buttons of various sizes, toggles, and different kinds of columns and information boxes. And to top it off it includes language support, portfolio taxonomy, free Google fonts, and features image support for images of any size. A carefully crafted theme for just $34, Libra is well varied and excellently suited for any portfolio, blog, or any other kind of site you want to make.
Coffee Junkie WordPress Version
Coffee Junkie is a very minimalistic layout, perfect for someone who just wants a simple personal webpage, whether for themselves, their works, or their company or group. True to its theme, the website sports a light brown gradient with mocha-colored text. Along with its alluring look, the one-page theme includes an animated slideshow banner and multiple buttons that easily link to parts of the page.
Lightbox effects and transitions when clicking images make for a particularly pretty effect. While simplistic, the pretty color combinations and little animations make a fairly solid theme. At $34, the theme is a good choice for anyone seeking something very simple and small; it’s pretty but without too many over-the-top animations and garnishes.
Gamma – Mobile Retina | HTML5 and CSS3 WordPress
Gamma is a theme designed exclusively for mobile platforms. Created mainly for bloggers, the theme includes a variety of colorful customizations and 8 different post types for a creative mind. The white theme contrasts nicely with photography and colorful headers, as well as splashes of black here and there. It looks quite simplistic, but very nice as well, with a modern vibe pulling it together.
As it is a mobile template, it of course comes with support for a variety of features designed for tablets and phones. Swipe gestures make navigating the site a snap. It also includes two sidebars located at the top of the screen; one contains the traditional home, search, and icons of that nature, and the other contains widgets such as recent posts and comments. For $29, this is the perfect theme for any bloggers who wish to appeal mainly to mobile audiences.
Hired
Hired, a beautiful but simple theme, is a vCard designed to help put your skills out there better than your competition. Sure to impress future bosses, this $25 theme looks simple on the outside, but quickly unwinds as the fluid transitions and animations guide you throughout the website. This theme makes use of a balance of beautiful photography and professional-looking whites and grays. The abundance of open space in the theme ties it together, and thanks to its responsiveness , the website will not appear crowded no matter what device it is accessed on.
Plus, if the organized pages centered around formal subjects such as your contacts, past employers, and so on are not enough, a masonry-styled blog page is included as well. Future employers can gain some insight into your life, or for the creative types, fans of your work could learn more about you. For any webmaster who wishes to have a beautiful, unique website to present themselves with, this is one of the best choices to go with.
Supply
Supply, a website design both attractive and functional, is an eCommerce theme for webmasters who wish to sell their wares online. It is fully compatible with multiple useful tools and plugins that will help you make the most of this theme. WooCommerce will give you easy control of the products you sell, AdSense compatibility will allow you to earn money from interested buyers, and several useful plugins come with Supply, such as the testimonials plugin.
As for its look, Supply uses a tasteful amount of white space, so the website feels more cozy than crowded. It also incorporates small splashes of color, giving it an aesthetic but not overdone appearance. All in all, Supply looks very good, and comes with a great amount of functionality as well. For anyone who wishes to get started selling their merchandise cheaply and easy, this $35 theme is definitely one of the best choices.
Vibe
Vibe, a simplistic theme intended for use by magazines and blogs, will get the job done with its efficient look and feel. With a clean but varied layout, the users of your site will not be bored as they read through articles and scroll through beautifully transitioned pages. Vibe’s animations may be subtle, but they add a great final touch and give it a unique feel.
The responsiveness of Vibe is flawless and the theme looks great on all manner of devices; it is accurate down to the smallest pixel! And, despite giving you the tools to make a website on par with the most popular of news sources and high-profile bloggers, the theme costs only $35. For anyone who wants a cheap theme that provides cleanness and fluidity, with the core focus on your content, Vibe is a great choice.
