10 years ago a browser was born.

Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye.

This website is dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers.

The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown website not only encourages users to get rid or abandon the aged browser but it also displays data based on the usage of Internet Explorer 6 around the world.

The website also provides users resources on how to spread the word about IE6 Countdown campaign or how to educate others on why they should stop using IE6. They even provide a tool for displaying a “You are using an outdated browser” banner for use on websites and blogs.

Microsoft has also designed special programs called “migration workshops” that are designed to help companies and business organizations that still use IE6 to have an easier and smoother transition to a more modern web browser. The program covers topics like how to address compatibility issues and virtualization solutions for IE6.

Some of you might be wondering what all the fuss is about IE6. Here’s a little background information for those who don’t have any idea about this topic. IE6 is the default web browser installed on Windows XP & Windows Server 2003 and because it is a very outdated browser, it has a lot of security issues and lacks support for modern web standards (XHTML, CSS, HTML5, etc.).

If you’re still using Internet Explorer 6, please do yourself a favor and upgrade to a later version of Internet Explorer or use an alternative web browser like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Opera.

Do you or someone you know still use Internet Explorer 6 or IE6 as their default web browser? What do you think of the Internet Explorer 6 Countdown website? Are you helping in spreading the word to get IE6 completely eradicated?

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.

Smashing Magazine definitely loves their readers, especially those who have WordPress blogs. Why? Because they’ve recently released another free premium quality WordPress theme called Magazeen, a 2 column, magazine type theme created by the WeFunction Design Agency.

Here’s a little introduction from the guys over at WeFunction:

“We’ve created the Magazeen theme to try and pump as much style and functionality into a WordPress theme to give people something they might not expect from their standard WordPress theme. There really is very few limits to what WordPress handle, so we’ve built in a lot of custom features and options to give people a little taste of what is possible, and how some small functionality tweaks can make a huge difference to the overall experience of browsing a blog. On top of that we’ve wrapped all that functionality up in a really cool and modern theme, with nice big title fonts, and a stylish colour scheme.

Features:

• 2 column
• Widget-ready
• jQuery Latest Image Showcase
• Related Posts Drop Down
• Latest Posts & Featured Posts
• Bottom bar
• Works with IE 7, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari
• XHTML and CSS compliant

Screenshot:

My Take:
The Magazeen WordPress theme was designed with typography, grids and magazine layout as the main focus and I believe that the authors/designers achieved that. Magazeen is not your standard WordPress theme or typical magazine theme. The authors added a lot of style and functionality to it. For me, the features that stand out and make the Magazeen theme unique are the jQuery Latest Image Showcase and the Related Posts Dropdown.

jQuery Latest Image Showcase

The latest posts are displayed and presented graphically by thumbnails that are automatically created using the Tim Thumb script, same script thats used in my blog’s theme. Post title appear when the mouse is hovered over the thumbnails. Its a good way to promote and encourage visitors to check out other blog posts.

Related Posts Dropdown

This is another tool to encourage visitors to explore the blog and check out related posts. These are found at the bottom of each featured post or most recent published displayed in the homepage and is displayed by clicking on the category name.

The Magazeen theme is widget-ready and come with custom widgets that you can use on the sidebar, like the Latest Posts and Featured Posts which can be activated and managed via the theme’s admin panel inside the WP dashboard. It also has a bottom bar or section in the footer where you can display categories or other content and information about your blog (which can be managed via the theme’s option page within the WP dashboard).

Regarding the color scheme, I know some of you might not like it but I think its a stylish color scheme. Anyways, if you really don’t like it, especially the color pink, you can easily change that by editing the theme’s stylesheet (style.css file). Same goes with the fonts which I know some of you might find too big, especially the post title font. Other than that, there’s nothing bad you can say about this theme. Great design, great layout, typography and functionality.

Overall, I can say that the Magazeen WordPress theme is one cool magazine theme that’s full of style and feature-rich. I’m sure many WordPress users would love to use this theme on their blogs. Kudos to the WeFunction Design Agency and of course to Smashing Magazine for releasing this beautiful WordPress theme!

Preview or Download the Magazeen WordPress theme.

The FREEmium WordPress theme was designed by Paul Kadysz and Dariusz Siedlecki and shared to us by the good folks at Freebiesdock.com.

Screenshots:
Homepage

Post page

Features:

• XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• jQuery menu
• quick submitting to web2.0 websites support
• flickrRSS plugin support
• threaded comments support
• feedBurner subscribe via email support
• a lot of advertising spots (125×125, 120×600, 300×250)
• 2 widget ready sidebars
• free for commercial & non-commercial use
• Compatible with Safari, Firefox 3.0x, Opera

My Take:
I LOVE IT! Honestly, if I found this theme earlier or if it was released earlier, I would’ve used this on my blog. Anyways, I almost couldn’t find anything wrong with this theme. The design is awesome, it has most of the features I want/need, very customizable, has 125×125 banner ad spots, support for Feedburner email subscription and its widget-ready. Design-wise, I like how the content are displayed in the homepage, complete with post image and post date. The categories and archives shown on the left sidebar, ad banners and recent comments on the right sidebar, no space is wasted. And in the post page, I like how the post details are displayed (post date, time, author), tags and especially the custom bookmarking option “Share This” section at the top part of the post. FREEmium also has built-in support for the flickrRSS plugin and gravatars.

Regarding customization, since the FREEmium theme doesn’t use too much graphics customizing it won’t be that difficult. If you decide to change the color scheme, you might have to do some editing as some of the graphics contain the default colors. But if you want customize the header, it won’t be a problem. You change the font style or create your own custom header image and use it. If you want a bigger or more attractive RSS feed icon, you can also change the default icon. The FREEmium WP theme has a lot of potential and just like the authors said, it was designed to be as customizable as possible but it would be better and much more customizable if the theme package included PSD files to the custom graphics.

Although the FREEmium WP Theme is a very beautiful and very well designed theme, it is not perfect and it can’t please everybody. There are some things that I think would be an issue for some users. First is the navigation menu. The FREEmium theme has little space so if your blog has a lot of pages, you might have a problem with that. You could make the font size smaller but that will only free up a little space. Best thing you can do is to move the navigation menu or the search bar someplace else. Next would be the post content width size. For the post image on top of the post, the image has to be 350 pixels wide and for other parts of the post, you can have images as wide as 460 pixels. If your current blog post images are bigger than that and you plan to use the FREEmium theme, then you’ll have to resize your images so it would fit into the theme layout. There’s also another fix that can address both issues and that is to increase the theme’s width but make sure that it’s still compatible with small screen resolutions (at least 1024×768 resolution).

To sum it all up, all I can say is that the FREEmium WP Theme is one of the best free WordPress themes I’ve ever seen. Paul and Dariusz did an amazing job with this theme and hats off to them and thanks to the people behind Freebiesdock.com for making this wonderful theme available for everyone.

Preview or Download the FREEmium WordPress theme.

*hat tip to AJ