I’m going to keep my Thematic WordPress theme. Nothing beats its simplicity and minimalism. It’s so crisp and clean. I don’t put up many photos or non-textual media, and Thematic lets readers focus on the writing. I just can’t find anything I like better.

I’d like to thank Ian Stewart for Thematic, which you can download here. I’ve modified Thematic on both my blog and my homepage by setting up a child theme that inherits properties of its parent.

Child themes allow you to tweak the design and look of your WordPress blog by overriding the properties the parent theme sets up. So why would you want to do this instead of directly altering the parent? If your theme is updated and you download that update, all your modifications will be erased. But if you have a child theme, they’ll be preserved since they’re in a separate file.

Here are some good places to learn about creating your own WordPress child theme.