Paid Themes:

After doing a lot of website development work, I must say that paying for a WordPress theme is usually the best bang for your buck. It will save you hours upon hours of time, it will work, and you will have the designer available to answer your questions. All of the paid themes suitable for churches that I have seen are less than $99. It’s worth the one-time cost to pay for a decent theme. Below are my recommendations for where you need to look for your church websites (If you really need a free theme, keep scrolling down, and I list them at the bottom of the page):

StuidioPress

StuidioPress has been making high-quality WordPress themes for a long time. I used one of their themes years ago and it was very advanced at the time. It seems like they’ve gotten even better lately. The Genesis Theme Framework is all the rage right now–it seems like there are all sorts of websites using it to build custom sites. They have one great theme for churches, the StudioPress Outreach Theme, but some of the other themes would work well for churches, too. These themes are definitely worth checking out.

iThemes

iThemes is often times my top recommendation for a novice WordPress user trying to build a church website. iThemes has a lot of different themes, all paid, many of which would work fabulous for churches. In fact, I decided to purchase their Architect Theme for our church’s website. Now they even have a theme built just for churches with the Foundation Church Builder Theme. iThemes could have the perfect solution for your church.

ChurchThemer

This is a new company that I’ve never used personally, but their themes are built specifically for churches and claim to be very user-friendly. Their themes look really great. If you use them, drop a comment below detailing your experience.

Disclosure: If you click on the links above and purchase a theme, I will receive a small affiliate payment for referring you. I originally wrote this post in March 2009 (I’ve updated it periodically since) to help people with their church websites, and I didn’t know anything about affiliate links. All of the above themes were in my original post. After about a year and a half of doing this, I realized that I could earn a referral fees for sending these businesses free traffic, so now I use affiliate links. I never recommend a product I don’t believe in. Contact me if you have any questions about this.

Some of the best free church WordPress themes:

• [UPDATE] Arras – I don’t know anything about this theme, other than I saw it on a church site the other day and it looks real nice.
• [UPDATE - Ministry Theme is now a premium-, paid theme] Ministry Theme – As you might guess, this theme is built specifically for ministry websites. I’ve never come across this theme, but it looks really great. As of right now, the theme isn’t able to be downloaded as the creators of the theme tweak it to be more compatible with WordPress 2.7. It also looks like they may re-release it as a paid theme, but up until now it was free. Thanks to Bill Robbins of Organized Themes for pointing this one out.
• Ashford – This theme claims to be among the most user-friendly for the novice. Among the unique traits of this theme is the ability to edit certain aspects of the website from the front end rather than having to login to the back end of the website at do all the editing. I have never used this theme, but if you have never used WordPress before (or will be allowing other people to edit the site who have little experience), this might be the perfect theme.
• LivingOS UPSILON – A very clean theme with a rotating picture header. Changing the pictures takes a little bit of code work, but it’s pretty easy to figure out. I used this theme to create PassingOnFaith.com for a conference I helped organize. This theme was designed specifically for churches. Check out the other themes at LivingOS.
• [UPDATE - Organized themes appears to only have paid themes now]Organized Themes.com – Run by a guy who worked as an associate pastor and realized churches need a simple way to present their web content and began designing WordPress themes. I’ve never used them, so I can’t speak for their user-friendliness but a few of them look really nice.
• Ocean Mist – Another really simple site, but I’ve never used it so can’t speak for it.
• Vigilance – This is the new theme that I just switched to here at MattCleaver.com. It has some really sweet features that could make it a great site for churches to use. Go to the linked page to see the extra goodies that I am not using right now on my site. I can also vouch that it is very user friendly, a great place to start for newbies who want some flexibility and customization options. This is one of the best free themes I’ve run into in a long time.
• Titan – Just released on March 11 by the same guy who made the above Vigilance theme, Titan is another amazing looking theme. This theme offers drop-down menus that are helpful for sites with a lot of pages.
• WooThemes (mostly paid themes, but some freebies) – WooThemes has some really sweet themes, most of them paid. There are a few free themes though, like the Original Premium News theme that Tim Schmoyer uses.

Using Themes

So far in this series we’ve learned the advantages of a self-hosted church website, hosting it through HostGator, and how to install WordPress to manage your website content. But now your website looks really ugly and boring, and we can’t have that. Thankfully, giving your WordPress website a whole new look is as simple as downloading a few files and then uploading them to your website (click here for step-by-step instructions to install a theme). These collections of files that style your website and give it a particular look are called “Themes.” There are tons of both free and paid themes available for WordPress, from the simple blog theme to a complex news and video website. If you Google “best WordPress themes” you will get a ton of websites who have compiled a list of themes that they think stand out. If you want a really great-looking website a paid theme is probably the way to go ultimately. Be warned though, that some of these themes require a significant amount of customization that may not be really easy to do at first. Most of these paid themes include step-by-step instructions for how to customize things like rotating picture banners, but you might have to dig a little bit to find it. Also, for the best appearance, you will need to crop pictures to certain sizes at times, which can be done pretty easily online at sites like Picnik.com.

Please leave some links and comments in the comments section below if you know of other great themes for churches. And yes, you can promote your own themes, paid or free! If I like them, I’ll add them to the body of the post.

[box type="info"]Use the Coupon Code “ChurchWebsite” when you sign up for website hosting through HostGator and you will get a 25% discount from HostGator. That also makes sure I get credited for referring you. Thanks! Find out more about HostGator.[/box]