Top 10 Free WordPress Themes

The WordPress community is big. Really big. We're talking thousands of designers and developers, tens of thousands of writers, and millions of users, all contributing to pushing WordPress forward. And one very popular way to do this is designing and developing free themes.

Free themes are a great way to get a blog or website off the ground. You might want to start writing about a topic but don't want to invest the money in a custom site design on top of hosting and a domain. And once your site is up and running, there's nothing to stop you dissecting them, building on top of them and learning from them. In this article we've selected 10 of the very best WordPress themes for you to use in your projects. Each is not only free to use and open to the public but also offers something special and unique.

Tools and Tips on how to Optimize Images for the Web

The time a page takes to load is something every designer worries about, or at least is something that every designer should worry about. It doesn’t matter if the layout is nice and beautiful if it doesn’t function properly. Since images can be pretty heavy, this is certainly an issue to keep an eye on. And this is why today we gathered a few links here to show you some tools and articles that will help you with this issue. Even if you are a pro at “saving as better quality jpg” it is always nice to check out some tools (old or new) to have you covered when it is time to optimize images.

Useful Tools

TinyPNG

TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files.

Smush.it

Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files.

OptiPNG

OptiPNG is a PNG optimizer that recompresses image files to a smaller size, without losing any information.

ImageOptim

ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster — by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations.

CodeKit

CodeKit helps you build websites faster and better. And it also helps you optimizing images.

imgo

Image optimization tool.

jQuery Lazyload

jQuery plugin for lazy loading images.

(source WDL)