The best place to find reputable WordPress themes free for use is the official WordPress theme repository. Every theme in the official repository is licensed under the GPL, which means that you can download it, modify it, and distribute your changes as you please.
You'll find themes for almost every use in the repository. There are themes for business sites, blogs, and even team communication. If you look hard, you'll probably find a theme you can use, or at least one you can modify to look the way that you want.
A web browser with Internet access is required to download themes from the official theme repository.
First fire up your browser and visit http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/. This is the theme repository home page, and looks like the following screenshot:
From the home page, you can browse themes by several different sorting criteria. Of note are the most popular, the newest, and the most recently-updated themes. If a theme appeals to you and you want to try it out, click on the name of the theme and then click on the download button on the resulting page. Be sure to read the theme's description to determine the type and placement of the dynamic sidebars, default widgets, and the different options that you can configure for the theme. As an example, you can see Arjuna X's theme page in the following image:
The WordPress Theme Repository hosts WordPress themes submitted by individual theme developers and that conform to the GPL—the same license that ships with WordPress. This means that all themes contained within the theme repository are free to use, modify, and redistribute as you wish.
When downloading items from the theme repository, you are almost guaranteed a stable well-developed theme that will work when you first install it. In addition, the themes that you download from there will not contain affiliate links or other malicious or obfuscated code that could negatively affect your WordPress blog.
Although browsing the repository by theme type or one of the special categories (like featured, new, or popular) is great in some instances, there are other ways to find a theme that will fit your exact needs. The following techniques will help you in your search for the perfect WordPress theme.
The Theme Repository includes a basic search function. Simply type in the search terms that you're looking for and the system will return the best-matched results. This is great if you're looking for a theme built for a particular purpose, such as photoblogging, podcasting, content aggregation, or business. The following image shows the search results page when searching for"2 column":
Another great way to find a theme that fits your particular needs is to use the WordPress theme repository's tag filter functionality. You can find this at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/tag-filter/. After checking your desired filtering criteria, click on the Find Themes button. You'll be presented with a screen like the one shown in the following screenshot:
