The clock is ticking and we have entered a brand New Year.

In business, content creation and content management is not stopping anytime soon and is one of the more valuable things you can do for your business.

Combine this with a smart content marketing and promotional strategy in search engines and social media, and you will build authority and trust with your audiences.

While there are many content management systems available, WordPress stands alone.

WordPress has tapped into a new and growing audience of website designers and developers who want to create a great-looking, easy-to-navigate site without the time-consuming development-from-scratch philosophy.

Already there are thousands of themes available (and more are being created every day, both free and paid). Around the world, there are an estimated 72 million WordPress sites (WP stats), providing content to nearly 400 million readers every month.

Those numbers may seem like a lot, but there appears to be no sign of the trend slowing down at all. Popular sites like NFL.org, Ted (blog), Techcrunch all use WordPress.

Fortunately, it’s easy for you to use it, too, with popular (many free) themes that are the ideal solution for the multifaceted needs of web-designers and developers.

Let’s dig in.

Responsive

Photo by ame247 via Flickr

It has become one of the most sought-after WordPress templates — partly because of its versatile functionality and easy-to-use features, but also because cross-platform adaptability is now an essential for a website’s success.

With nine page templates available, along with full CMS control, this theme has 900,000 downloads, and the developers continue to release feature updates to this popular theme. This theme is often used for entertainment-related sites, though sites of other types have implemented this theme as well.

Attitude

Photo by ame247 via Flickr

The name of this theme says it all — it’s simple, responsive and image-focused.

With a myriad of site options, you can easily adjust the site’s logo design, layout, look and feel with custom custom background, header, menu, CSS, and webclip icon. This theme is often used for entertainment-related sites, with a history of 200,000 downloads.

Bouquet

Photo by ame247 via Flickr

It’s another simple, easy-to-customize design theme, but the title accurately suggests the floral slant. The custom header, background and other flexible features makes this a great first-site option, often used for personal blogs. You’ll also see examples of use for small businesses. It has more than 100,000 downloads.

Sundance

Photo by ame247 via Flickr

No list of popular WordPress themes would be complete without this theme. As its name suggests, this theme addresses the multimedia/video need, with this easy-to-use and implement site, developed by Automatic. The featured-video carousel and the custom segments of the site (header, background and widgets) make this site an ideal choice for personal and small-business use.

Catchbox

Photo by ame247 via Flickr

This theme is ideal for both the personal blogger and the blogging professional, with a history of more than 500,000 downloads. Here’s another one that makes use of responsive-design technology, so you’ll know that your site should be cross-platform compatible.

With this theme, you also have the option of light, dark, blue, green, red and brown color scheme. You don’t need to code in CSS to easily change the look and feel of this site to make it more closely match your favorite colors or the brand colors for your business.

photo credit: Huasonic | cc

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