Why I Feel Vigilance is the Best ‘Free’ Theme on WordPress

I’m a freebooter, in the sense that I use the free service offered by WordPress. And by golly, is it awesome. However, I’ve always found it very confusing to select the right theme for my earlier blogs, the failure of which is a different story altogether, and which I will address at some point of time in the future. So there I was, browsing through the themes I’d seen before so many times, trying out a handful of them, and returning to the themes page unsatisfied. And then, suddenly, here was something I’d not seen before. Vigilance. I wanted a fresh theme for my first blab, and when I saw the widgets and theme options pages, I went “w00t!”.

The sidebar(s)

Of all the themes, Vigilance has the most flexible sidebar. There’s this wide sidebar, which is basically a sidebar which allows widgets to use the full space available. However, there are the left and right sidebars too, which split the sidebar into two. What’s best, you have the option of using any one, any two, or all three sidebars, which means you can have a two-column (using only the wide sidebar) or three-column (using only the left and right sidebars) blog, or a combination (using all three, like in Blabberwocky).

Custom colours

Okay, this could have been better, but it still is a hell lot. Vigilance gives you the option of customizing the background colour (the part of the page which always stays blank; here you see it’s dark brown), the border colour (the one separating the background from the rest of the page; black, in this case), and the link colour (to match your header and/or background; I’ve left it untouched). As I said, it could have had even more options, but it still has more colour options than any other theme.

(Note: you’ll need to enter hexadecimal colour codes for this. You can find an exhaustive hexadecimal colour chart here.)

And also

You can add an alert box which appears below the header and above your latest post. Then, there’s the option of excluding pages from the header navigation, say for example if you have ten pages and you want only three of them to accompany your header. All this comes with an otherwise fluid look which makes the sidebar subtle and puts the focus on your posts. Add to it the custom header option, of course, and you have my pick for the best theme on WordPress. If you don’t have a custom CSS upgrade, that is.