Here’s a short intro from the theme author:

A clean Portfolio Theme ideal for photographers, artists and designers to showcase their portfolios. This is our first attempt at creating a WordPress theme and then offering it on a public domain. The theme does need intermediate level of familiarity with WordPress. There is an online help document available to get you started. You may download this theme for free and use it on your site; however you may NOT remove the Dizeno Co link in the footer.

Basic Features:

• 2 column (blog section)
• Fixed Width
• Widget-ready
• jQuery slider (homepage)
• Twitter-ready
• 3 category templates – full posts, excerpts & thumbnails only
• Compatible with IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari
• CSS and XTHML standards compliant

Screenshots:
Homepage

Post page

My Take:
The Brave Zeenat WordPress theme is a simple, clean and beautiful portfolio style theme that you can use for your online portfolio. It’s widget-ready, has several category and page templates, has a nice jQuery-powered slider on the homepage. Another cool thing about this theme is that the theme download includes the sources file or PSDs for the templates, page headers, portfolio titles, logo and buttons so the user can basically edit and customize the look and feel of the entire theme. Aside from that, it also includes a Help Document that can help you with the installation, configuration and customization of the Brave Zeenat theme.

Brave Zeenat requires the use of third-party WordPress plugins – WP PageNavi and Limit Post, both are included in the theme download.

Overall, the Brave Zeenat is a clean, simple, lightweight portfolio style WordPress theme that’s highly customizable. Kudos to the folks of Dizeno Co for creating and releasing the Brave Zeenat WordPress theme for FREE to the community!

IMPORTANT: The Brave Zeenat WordPress theme is FREE to download in the condition that the Dizeno Co footer link remains intact. If you want to remove the footer link, you can purchase the Pro version for $37.

Preview or Download the Brave Zeenat WordPress Theme.

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

It’s been a while since I last featured a theme from Smashing Magazine so today I decided to review one. Designed by Omar Corrales and released by Smashing Magazine for its readers, the SimpleFolio theme is a beautiful, simple and clean portfolio style WordPress theme that has tons of features.

Here’s a short introduction from Smashing Magazine:

Today we are glad to release a beautiful, simple and clean portfolio WordPress theme — SimpleFolio, designed by Omar E. Corrales and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. SimpleFolio is a portfolio theme that includes a blog and a very extensive option page that allows you to exclude all your portfolio items from the blog page. It also includes a front page slider.

It has 2 different widget areas and threaded comments, and also supports paged comments and has 2 different page templates for advanced usage. The control of images is done from the post page.

Basic features:

• CSS-based layout
• 2 columns of fixed width
• Widget-ready
• Threaded comments support
• Built-in gravatar support
• XHTML 1.0 Transitional valid
• Multi-browser compatibility: tested on Firefox, Safari , IE7, IE8, Chrome
• Easy to setup, theme options page

Screenshots:
Homepage

Portfolio

Blog

My Take:
SimpleFolio is simple, yet elegant. It’s a clean and beautiful portfolio style WordPress theme. Aside from the beautiful design and layout, it also has very good typography and tons of features that can be configured in the theme options page. It also has some of the basic features that most WordPress users need like widget-ready sections, built-in gravatar support and threaded comments support.

This theme doesn’t use much graphics and has a CSS-based layout so its lightweight and loads up pretty fast. It’s also designed to work with different web browsers, so users won’t have to worry whether their clients use IE, Firefox, Chrome or Safari to view their portfolio. Aside from having a portfolio, users can use the blog to publish some information, events or anouncements.

Here are some of the settings that you can configure in the theme options page are – custom logo, custom favicon, site keywords, site description, Feedburner URL, Twitter URL, Welcome title, Welcome text, excerpt length, slogan, quote text, social box title and social box message. You can view a screencast on how to add images to the slider here.

The SimpleFolio theme is a nice theme to use and start with if you’re planning to put up an online portfolio website. It’s a free WordPress theme but it has premium-quality design and tons of features. IMO, SimpleFolio is easily one of the best portfolio style WordPress themes out there.

Once again, hats off to Smashing Magazine for releasing this premium quality WordPress theme to the public for free and kudos to the theme author for creating a very beautiful theme.

Preview or Download the SimpleFolio WordPress Theme (version 1.5)*

*SimpleFolio version 1.5 no longer uses the TimThumb script. If you want to use TimThumb, you can download version 1.3 here.

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

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.