A couple years back you’ll have a difficult time finding a good portfolio style WordPress theme thats free. These days, there are lots of very nice premium quality portfolio themes that WordPress users can choose from. One of those themes comes from Graph Paper Press and its called the Work-A-Holic theme.

Work-a-holic is a free minimalistic two and three column WordPress theme that focuses mainly on showcasing portfolios for artists, web designers, photographers and illustrators. Work-a-holic separates your portfolio from your blog, enabling easy navigation for clients in a clean, intuitive fashion. It also has a separate sidebar for portfolio (shows recent projects) and a separate widgetized sidebar for the blog and pages.

Main Features:

• Separate Blog and Portfolio Section
• Blog lists posts as normal blog
• Portfolio pulls latest thumbnail of the post and lists each of them on three columns
• Multiple image gallery container (slider) on portfolio posts
• Basic Theme Options
• Twitter integrated – shows latest Tweet
• Separate sidebar on Portfolio and normal sidebar on Blog
• One Page template with separate sidebar
• Ability to have a separate desired Thumbnail if WP-Post-Thumbnail plugin is installed
• jQuery effects on Portfolio thumbnails
• Multi-level Drop Down Menu
• Support Nested Comments
• Three footer widgets
• Uses 960 css framework and jQuery javascript framework
• XHML: This theme has been tested on Firefox, Safari, IE 8, 7, 6.

Screenshots:
Portfolio Homepage

Blog Homepage

Blog Post

My Take:
If you’re an artist, web designer, photographer or illustrator who’s planning to create a WordPress-powered online portfolio, you should definitely check out the Work-A-Holic theme. If was gonna create my own online portfolio, I’d definitely consider this theme. Its simple and minimalistic but doesn’t lack on the features/functions that you’ll need for an online portfolio. This theme also lets you put up a blog and have it separate from the portfolio.

Basic features include widgetized sidebars, widgetized bottom bar/footer with custom widgets, built-in gravatar support, Twitter integration and nested comments support. For the portfolio section of this theme, you can have a multiple image gallery on your portfolio posts with jQuery effects on the portfolio thumbnails and if you have the WP-Post-Thumbnail plugin installed, you can choose to have a separate thumbnail.

This theme only has one color scheme but because it doesn’t use much custom graphics making it highly customizable. Customizing this theme is something that can be easily done via a few tweaks on the stylesheet and/or using your own custom background image. The Work-A-Holic theme has an option page that lets the user specify the Blog Category ID and Twitter username.

In the Work-A-Holic post page, the author has provided some links with examples of the built-in gallery script in action, portfolio category archive, blog archive and page template. There’s also a video tutorial on how to separate the blog and portfolio and setting up the images and excerpts on Work-a-Holic. The theme files also include an html file with instructions on how to install, setup and configure the Work-A-Holic theme.

The Work-A-Holic is an excellent portfolio style freemium WordPress theme and kudos to the folks at Graph Paper Press for a job well done and for creating and releasing it to the public.

IMPORTANT: Graph Paper Press requires users to sign-up with a valid email address to download their themes.

Preview or Download the Work-A-Holic WordPress theme.

NOTE: This theme was scanned using the Theme Authenticity Checker and doesn’t contain any hidden or encrypted code.