ThemeShaper

For quite some time now, ThemeShaper—now part of Automattic—has been my reference of all things WordPress themes. I’ve built a number of child themes on top of their themes and will likely continue to do so.

Current favorites are Cerauno, Sela and Karuna. I don’t care much if they’re called magazine or business style, either. Using CSS and very few PHP template files, I find myself able to turn these themes into almost anything.

All these themes are based on the Underscores starter theme, by the way, making them all very similar to code against. Love a limited learning curve when deadlines are tight!