Oh, there are probably many wonderful ones. But the process of finding them is deeply ugly.

For this site, I’m looking for a theme that supports a homepage image that’s not on the other pages, that supports featured images in both pages and posts and a sidebar (I think I’d prefer right) on the homepage, posts, and pages.

I don’t actually care if it supports picking fonts and sizes and such for everything in the UI; so long as they’re implemented right underneath, that’s easily set in custom CSS. I do however want good modern “responsive” layout so it works on phones and tablets and desktops, and on non-full-screen windows too.

Despite it being a photo site, I don’t care about gallery or lightbox support in the WordPress part; that’s all down in the Piwigo gallery section.

Oh, and is free. Or at least a one-time purchase (I see the rental price of $49/year remarkably commonly), but there are so many decent free ones that it seems irresponsible to pay.

Anybody who stumbled on the site after I turned off the login requirement today (or any of the few people I notified for the “soft open”) may have seen it flapping from theme to theme as I played with another half dozen today.

(The theme here right now, as I’m first typing this, is the free version of Seos White.)