Free WordPress Themes: wpstyle.sheley.org
A side project from the Sheley Enterprises years
Alongside vBulletinSetup and my forum admin work, I ran a small site giving away free WordPress themes: wpstyle.sheley.org. It's long gone from the live web, but the Wayback Machine kept a record of it.
What wpstyle.sheley.org Was
By October 2008, wpstyle.sheley.org was a small blog-style site releasing free, widget-ready WordPress themes — each post included a live demo link, a direct download, and a short rundown of the theme's features. It ran on the same subdomain infrastructure as the rest of my web work at the time, alongside vBulletinSetup.
Every theme came with a simple ask: edit it however you like, just keep the copyright link in place. That was a pretty standard practice for free WordPress themes in that era — a small credit link back to the theme's origin in exchange for giving the whole thing away for free.
The Themes
At least 13 free themes are visible in the archived snapshot alone — there may have been more.
Manhattan
3-column, widget-ready, fixed width. Released October 2008.
CalmField
Blue, 2-column, widget-ready, fixed width. Released October 2008.
Bedroom
Orange, single-column, widget-ready. Released October 2008.
New York
Blue, single-column, widget-ready. Released October 2008.
Simply Green MultiWidget
Multiple footer widget zones alongside the sidebar — more layout flexibility than most of the others.
Trippy City
Free WordPress theme release.
Dark Street
Free WordPress theme release.
Cool Colors
Dark-styled free WordPress theme release.
Green Tech
Free WordPress theme release.
Blue/White Tech
Free WordPress theme release.
Smarty Beach
Free WordPress theme release.
Dark Blue/Orange
Free WordPress theme release.
Looking Back
wpstyle.sheley.org was a small piece of a bigger picture — while I was doing paid vBulletin work and building vBulletinSetup into a real business, I was also just building things and giving them away, the same instinct that later showed up in running Think Big Topeka and everything else on this site.