Free WP Theme – The Clam Shell

I am proud to announce that I finally finished a WordPress theme that I can release as a freebie. The Clam Shell is a very traditional two-column theme with as little complicated feature as possible. What I mean is sometimes – you just want a theme to function as bare bones as it can. I mean, I’ve built themes that are: widgetized, plug-in dependent, uses custom fields and special loop queries – that users feel compelled to pick up a “Worpress for Dummies” book in order to use. That is not what I’m trying to do with the Clam Shell.

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This functions like the straight out of the box default theme by Kubrick. Well – except for the widgets. I purposely disabled widgets because I feel that if you are to add something to the theme – it’s best to write it in the templates themselves. In other words, the Clam Shell is for bloggers, who have some theme coding and Photoshop abilities.

Why Clams?

I really don’t know. In my mock up – I needed something for the logo section, typed C-L-A-M by accident, and just went through with it. It was one of those moments that I was in a “design” roll that I was afraid to pause – so the name carried on. Why the clam shells all over? See, my original plan was to make the theme look good, but kind of splatter shells all over – that you would need the .psd file to customize. That’s when a light bulb switched in my head “I’ll give the theme for free…but sell the PSD!“. But Themeforest.net rejected my entry – because it wasn’t “high quality” enough – so there goes that plan. Note that I am giving the .psd files away as well – but only when you leave a comment. This is because it’s too large that I don’t want it eating my bandwidth.

Some Features

I started out with the 960.gs CSS framework but stopped halfway through. The reason is – the mockup may have been 960 pixels, but the columns in span irregularly. So its a perfect 960 pixels, but columns within are not based on the grid. I added large twitter, rss and contact icons in the header – which I think is a little different. Static content in the sidebar – with icons from the Practika collection by Smashing Magazine. Stock photos are from the amazing stock.xchng , while fonts are traditional Arial and Georgia all around.

I hand coded the sociable buttons in the single post template. I feel that this is best since no plug in is required for it to run. The icons are from Best Free Icons – the Aquaticus set.

Time for a Demo?

That’s right – I even set up a demo website. You can try out The Clam Shell from this link. Download the theme from here. All I ask in return is to follow me in Twitter. As mentioned – I will provide the original photoshop files so you can take those nasty clams out of there. If you need additional customization hints – contact me.

Update – Download the PSD files from here!