We all need inspiration for creating the perfect blog design. Whether you design the theme for yourself or have a professional design one for you, there are important elements that you want to see in your theme.

WordPress themes have become increasingly more powerful, delivering the ability to manage content and bring the platform to deliver more than just textual content, but media content, too. With more themes and resources available, people with less experience with blogging, designing, and coding will be able to implement the ideas from the tutorials.

In this roundup of posts from the past week or so, several design resources have been presented which will provide good inspiration and tools to optimize your theme to create the impression in your readers’ minds that bring them back.

20+ More First Class WordPress Themes (Smashing Magazine)

Smashing Magazine has once again created a high quality resource highlighting the best themes, many of which I have never seen before. Whether you are looking for a simple, minimalist, stylish, or simply a theme for showcasing images, they have all been included. You’ll be able to make a statement with these themes as many have not been given the proper credit or else are relatively new and need promotion.

They have also included the new admin themes, contact manager plugin/theme, and the Prologue theme.

Other collections in their series include: 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes, 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen, and 21 Fresh, Usable, and Elegant Themes.

45+ Must See WordPress Themes (Noupe)

Noupe, a resource for web design, has put together an outstanding resource with themes recently released, organized in a simple manner. Themes have been designated into several categories - minimalist, grunge, news and magazine, mobile, unique ideas, personal, by the number of columns, photo-oriented, artistic, and elegant. Obviously, there are dozens that you may find suitable for your blog. Included themes are both free and premium (paid).

An additional note: This post is the second article in a four-part series on how to master WordPress, taking a look at tutorials, hacks, themes, kplugins, and best practices to make the most out of WordPress. The first post gained a lot of buzz from the community and is highly recommended, even for people experienced with the platform.

Blog Design Madness (Vandelay Website Design)

A competition started by Vandelay Web Design was set up as a face-off between various designs, some of which have been selected by readers. Of the sixty-four designs, the highest rated will move on to the “next round” whereas others will be eliminated. You can vote on your favorite theme between the two listed (each poll is open for twenty-four hours).

On March 24, they created a resource list of 101 Typography Resources for Web Designers that brings together thousands of free and downloadable fonts as well as insightful articles for better blog typeface design.

Live Wire Theme Series

Live Wire is a premium theme series created by Adii and Mark Forrester and is available for purchase at Premium News.

Looking at the previews of the theme, it appears to be an extremely high quality theme with all the key features that bloggers are looking for such as ad management. The themes are all clean, organized magazine-style themes with various formats and color schemes.

Live Wire 2.0 

Live Wire Edition 

 

Live Wire Style 

There are three different themes - Live Wire 2.0, Live Wire Edition, and Live Wire Style.

Main features include:

• Automatic Image Resizer - Resizes all images no matter what size you have uploaded.
• Author Profiles - Allows the theme to be used for multi-author blogs and also includes Gravatar support to display thumbnails of authors/comments.
• Custom Page Templates - Theme includes custom page tempaltes for General Archives, a Sitemap, and Image Galleries.
• Color Schemes - Four different color schemes are included to better suit your personal taste in design.
• Featured news section
• Video Panel for use with Flash videos
• Navigation Drop Down Menus
• Sidebar Tabbed Box
• 2 different homepage layouts for the featured section
• Widgetized sidebars
• Banner ad management integration
• Flickr and FeedBurner integration

Preview:
Live Wire 2.0
Live Wire Edition
Live Wire Style

Purchase/Pricing:
Pricing for themes starts at $99.95 for a Single License for individual themes, a Developer’s License at $249.95 (which includes all three themes).

A Live Wire Package - Single License includes all three themes (12 total styles) and also allows you to use any of the themes on two sites at the same time. This package runs for $149.95.

Available for purchase here.

SilveRay Clean and Soft 3-Column WordPress Theme from Blog Perfume

From BlogPerfume, the SilveRay WordPress theme is their first theme, which is clean and soft, has three columns, is widget-ready, customizable, and has been tested on various browsers. The theme is also ads friendly, has SweetTitle tooltip installed, LiveClick installed, and has a search bar at the top corner.

License: Footer links back to Blog Perfume must remain intact.
Price: Free
Preview

At WPDesigner, Small Potato, has announced that his site was sold, likely at or above the $66,000 current bid price.

For the people that won free subscriptions to the $5/Year Themes Club, the new owner will be continuing it. WP Designer will aslo be occasionally while he is traveling at his personal site (and perhaps his main site).

For further announcements, you can listen to the live interview with him on March 22nd, 2008 at 9 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time). It will begin with his inspiration, why he chose to work on WordPress, the reasons for his site going up for sale, and the outlook for the WordPress themes market.