These days everyone and their mother seems to have a blog. A popular choice to run a blog is WordPress, it powers this blog and a few others that I run.

A good way to make your blog stand out from the crowd is with a custom theme. Developing themes for WordPress is pretty simple, if you know HTML/CSS and PHP, but nobody wants to start from scratch each time they develop a theme, these Starter Themes provide a simple canvas on which you can create your custom themes.

Starkers

Released by Elliot Jay Stocks and recently upgraded for WordPress 2.6.2, Starkers provides a very basic starting point, no formatting what so ever.

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Starter from WPCandy

Unlike the other themes here, Starter is not intended to be used out of the box, rather provide a basic template to start developing your theme.

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Whiteboard

It is designed to speed up the process of designing and coding a WordPress theme by eliminating the time spent on WordPress’ back-end PHP that is used in every theme. Whiteboard is clean, noted, and compact (only 104 KB in size). It includes all the standard PHP tags and PHP files needed for a WordPress theme – plus a few extras.

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WordPress Naked

The aim with Naked is that a developer with an XHTML template that they’ve already developed can very quickly apply it to this no-frills theme with the minimum of fuss and research.

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Sandbox

The Sandbox is a powerful tool available for WordPress theme designers and developers. The Sandbox can be easily designed just with CSS, so beginners will feel comfortable not bothering with PHP.

Preview

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Refueled : Blank WordPress Themes

Available in a number of configuration, 2 and 3 columns, with left and right sidebars.

Vorlage

Templates without design. HTML only if it is absolutly necessary for you. But full of comments to explain the functions.

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Cutline

an incredibly powerful, flexible theme that runs on our favorite blogging software. It’s free; it’s awesome; and it was built with your success in mind.

Demo

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Blank Theme (Premium: single license $79.95)

This theme is ideal for those who want to highly customize the Essence layout, or simply want a clean, sharp look.

Buy Link