Whether you are a designer or developer (or both), using a basic blank theme to start your projects is probably the best solution that most web professionals use. A lot of developers create their own blank theme and save it locally to work off, however there are a number of basic frameworks set-up for this specific purpose, you can download for free.
Rather than spending your time annoyingly deleting unnecessary features from an already existing theme, you can spend it building your new theme. This kind of workflow is much cleaner, more logical and saves you time. Plus it’s just the right way to do things.
Different developers call these starter-themes different names, such as bare, naked, basic, frameworks, blank or starter themes. However regardless of how you choose to label them, they all serve the same purpose: Create a solid WordPress back-end to start from.
Below we have collected some of the best of these themes, from a number of reputable web developers and designers. We have included everything from completely blank bare-bone themes with no CSS at all, to responsive WordPress Starter-themes with a number of included free features. Note we have also included HTML5 and XHTML based frameworks.
Blank WordPress Theme by Chris Coyier
Chris Coyeier’s blank WordPress theme is based on XHTML 1.0 STRICT, with all the functionality of a typical WordPress theme but almost none of the styling. The idea is that when starting a new theme, it is far easier to use this as a base then a theme that is already finished and styled.
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HTML5 Blank WordPress Theme
HTML5 Blank is a powerful open-source shell for rapidly deploying your WordPress projects. It uses basic semantic HTML5 markup and is 100% W3C valid. It also comes with a number a useful functions and has very little CSS.
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Simon WordPress Framework & Blank Theme
Simon WordPress Framework is a next to blank WordPress theme for developers. It is already fully responsive based on a 1200px grid. While there are some styling, all the code is clean and well organised.
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Roots HTML5 Developer Theme
Roots is a WordPress starter theme based on HTML5 Boilerplate & Bootstrap that will help you make better themes. It has a number of useful features such as auto minification of scripts and is fully responsive.
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Toolbox HTML5 WordPress Starter Theme
If you’re looking for a completely un-styled HTML5 based WordPress theme for development, then this a pretty good solution. Toolbox, as the name implies has a number of great features and tools included.
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PlainTxt Blog
The original minimalist three-column theme for WordPress. It’s uncluttered layout makes it ideal for customization, with a wide content area to ensure your content is what visitors notice.
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Bones WordPress Theme For Developers
Built around the HTML5 Boilerplate, Bones is a rock solid foundation to start any WordPress project. Keep what you need, remove what you don’t. It’s totally up to you. Frameworks are great, but sometimes they make things more complicated than they need to be. Bones is bare and as minimalistic as possible. It’s meant to be used as a per-project template, this means no Child Themes.
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Starkers Blank Theme
Starkers is a bare-bones WordPress theme created to act as a starting point for the theme designer. Free of all style, representational elements, and non-semantic markup, Starkers is the perfect ‘blank slate’ for all your WordPress projects.
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Underscores WordPress Starter Theme
Undescrore is a minimal WordPress starter theme for designers. You can choose the options you like and then generate your theme for download.
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WordPress Naked
WordPress Naked is a simple WordPress theme to assist developers that need to quickly implement a blog but don’t really have the time to spend looking under the hood in any detail or reading documentation when it comes to applying a custom theme (e.g. their clients’ design).
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HTML5 Reset WordPress Blank Theme
The HTML5 Reset WordPress theme is a blank theme based on the HTML5 Reset templates. It’s a great empty slate upon which to build your own HTML5-based WordPress themes.
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WP Foundation
WP foundation is based on Zurb’s Foundation. It is a clean responsive WordPress starter theme with a number of included features and functions such as buttons, slider and shortcodes.
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VeryPlain Text WordPress Developer Theme
The original minimalist two-column theme for WordPress. A fluid layout with a newspaper-ish feel, its solid layout, thoughtful design elements, and numerous theme options make this theme much more than simply “plain.” This is the minimal classic WordPress theme.
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Handcrafted WP Starter Theme
Handcrafted WP is a starter theme built for WordPress developers who are doing more than building blogs. The theme is based on Ian Stewart’s Toolbox Starter theme and Paul Irish & Divya Manian’sHTML5 Boilerplate plus some other awesome features.
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Reverie HTML5 WordPress Framework
Reverie Framework is an extremely versatile HTML5 WordPress framework based on ZURB’sFoundation, a powerful tool for building prototypes on any kind of devices. Reverie Framework inherits all the cool features from Foundation, and packs with several other interesting features to optimize the experience for WordPress and HTML5. Including customized output for WordPress menus, caption and pagination.
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WhiteBoard Framework For WordPress
Whiteboard framework for WordPress was developed to speed up the development of WordPress themes. Whiteboard does so by eliminating the time spent on code common to all WordPress themes and includes non-intrusive code that improves the overall WordPress theme in many ways – including SEO, speed, usability, mobile support, and multi-lingual support.
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HTML5 WordPress Shell
WordPress Shell is based on HTML5 Valid mark-up and contains massive host of free features and functions such as shortcodes, anti-virus, visual editor, Google Analytics integration and lot’s more.
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SandBox WordPress Developer Theme
Sandbox is a starting point for designers and developers. Sandbox is rich with semantic classes powered by dynamic functions and Microformats.
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TwentyTen Five
Built to accompany an article in Smashing Magazine, TwentyTen Five is an HTML5 upgrade of the default WordPress TwentyTen theme. It’s completely free, easy to build on, and brings brand new HTML5 elements and functionality to WordPress.
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Simplr WordPress Naked Theme
Simplr is a bare-bones blank one-column WordPress theme for developers. It has built-in navigation, breadcrumbs and recent-comments.
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Hybrid Base
Hybrid Base is a starter/base theme for developers. It’s primary purpose is to make it quicker for developers to build new themes off the Hybrid Core framework. It’s secondary purpose is to facilitate the use of Hybrid Core for theme developers who are just learning how to build from it.
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WP Bootstrap
WP Bootstrap is a simple starter-theme with a number of built-in features. It’s fully responsive and includes responsive-navigation, breadcrumbs, customizable background, threaded comments and much more.
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Foundation For WordPress Theme
Foundation, for WordPress, is a blank WordPress starter theme built on ZURB’s Foundation Framework v4. It features clean semantic code, support for custom headers and backgrounds and the WordPress Shortcode API.
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Thematic HTML5 WordPress BoilerPlate
A blank WordPress theme using HTML5 and based on Thematic ToolBox (and other Thematic themes).
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1140 Fluid Starkers WordPress Theme
Fluid Starkers is a WordPress starter theme based off Elliot Jay Stocks’ Starkers WordPress Theme and Andy Taylor’s 1140px CSS Grid. It’s fully responsive and has a number of cool functions and features.
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Skeleton
Skeleton is a simple, responsive theme from Simple Themes. It has a number of built in functions and features and is an awesome starter theme if your not looking to code a lot of basic back-end stuff.
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PressWork
The PressWork Toolbox lets you style any theme in a live preview environment without any code, drag & drop to set your layout in seconds, add Google fonts, and much more. It’s a good solution for people who arn’t very familiar with PHP and CSS but want somewhere to start.
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Which of these starter/blank themes are you going to use for your next project? Have you used any of these already? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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