One great WordPress theme, hold the photography please

I appear to be obsessed with use of images on the web. And right now, right this second, it’s purely selfish.

I’ve mentioned it before over on the Collective Content blog. The bottom line to that post was that increasingly consumers of content prefer visual content. It has never been easier to create or distribute.

(Hey, even my last post here – a visual aerial tour of London at night – did great traffic and was easy to (re-)post.)

But that previous Collective Content item was mainly written with content creators (the media, marketers, bloggers) in mind alongside the rise in popularity of visual social networks such as Pinterest and Instagram. (It was written a month before Instagram’s $1bn Facebook acquisition.) Only this isn’t just about content.

I’m looking to overhaul the basic collectivecontent.co.uk website at the moment. I’m really pleased with the content and services I’ve added since the start of the year (lots of blog posts, a newsletter and even a page for my e-book) but always knew the design – simply an adapted WordPress Twenty Ten theme – was extremely basic. (To put it in polite terms.)

I might not implement a new WordPress theme personally but I’m doing the initial whittling down and ultimately want it to look good.

Here’s the problem: So many premium WordPress themes look great – as long as you have great photography.

I can go out and commission photos. But photos of what, exactly?

The WordPress theme to this blog (a version of Inuit Type) is pretty good, I think, at ‘wordy’ content. But it’s not a corporate look. If anyone out there knows a good WordPress theme that is professional and works with a modest number of photos/infographics/videos/other non-text content formats then do give me a shout.

In other news, this is surely a fertile time for decent photographers and graphic designers, right?

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Follow Tony on Twitter – @tphallett