I've used both free and paid themes. Right now I'm loving Lifestyle by Studio Press.
There are thousands of free themes, but you should carefully inspect them. Designers sometimes put links in them that you might not want your site associated with.
I'm very new at this, so take it with a grain of salt. Also remember that I may speak Chinese better than the language of coding, html, css, and php.
When I was doing my first website on WP, I struggled with the technical stuff. I was using a free theme that I had downloaded from a big site that was already customized to my niche. It even had a header that would have been fine for along time - it looked great.
But I couldn't make it work, one issue after another. Support was non-existent. Finally, I hired somebody to help, who quickly discovered that the theme itself contained errors. Whether this was from it's original development or due to a recent upgrade in WP, I didn't know. And fixing it was not something that made sense.
I quickly shifted over to one of the hundreds of free themes available through the wp interface itself. I intentionally looked for one that had a lot of customizable features, lots of support in the forums, and was still being actively updated and tweeked by the developers. I donated to those developers. They've been kind to my technical challenges and helped me along.
Those that know WP already might want to stick with the free themes in WP selection rather than venture out into the off WP world. At least, at first.
As far as purchasing a theme, I figured I would save on that money for other tools that will make me successful. I can use what's free for now, making it look pretty good. If I develop a site that really gets hot, I can buy a theme or have one done especially for that site.
I'm sure others have a different perspective, but that's how I looked at this. Sort of like, I'll buy the best house I can afford now, paint the walls, buy a few pillows, make it look nice - and the minute I can afford it, I'll upgrade to a better house.
I have only used free Word Press themes with great success. While I always give credit in the footer to the creator, I do remove links that are unrelated to my site and would be inappropriate.
There are many wonderful free themes out there. If the theme is difficult or seems to have issues, I don't use it. I also try to stay away from themes that are over used. If you search a little harder/longer you can find an amazing theme that isn't over used.
I have found great themes with people behind them who give really good support.
I start off doing a search ~ Wordpress your keyword theme. That usually gets me some good results. Or, I think of a more general keyword phrase related to my site. I don't usually include the word "free", but some may think it is necessary.
You might want to find a good theme that will allow you to say... add banners, add widgets, etc. 'Cos if you are new to WP customization and coding, directly editing the WP files might become a nightmare.
I check out free themes all the time, but you do need to exercise a bit of caution. The payoff for free theme designers is usually backlinks or traffic through footer links, which is understandable, but some of them get nasty and rig these themes with hidden code.
Here's a tip for inspecting free themes for suspicious code.
Download the zipped theme to your hard drive and unzip it. Go into the folder and find the file "footer.php". Open this in a text editor (like Windows Notepad). Footer codes are usually very short, but if you see a php code with a very long binary string (like "t74kFC944lB...") the designer has placed hidden code in the theme. These are usually there to place ads for gambling or something, but can harbor more hostile intentions. You often cannot simply discard the code without wrecking the page layout. When I find one of these, I just dump the theme. Unfortunately, a lot of otherwise nice looking themes have them. At some sites, easily half the themes have hidden code, too.
Still, there are lots of good free themes without sneaky stuff. You can check out a few at my little subdomain here.
Wordpress themes - where do you get them?
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