Free Joomla Templates

Article Audience: Generic Users / Webmasters / Developers

Templates are one of the great features of Joomla. The separation of the content from the look of a website enables users to quickly change the look of a site without changing any of the content.

You will probably find that the same templates are repeated over and over again in each site listed here since each site tries to gather as many templates as possible.

The largest collection (1400+) of free templates can be found here: http://www.joomla24.com/

Another large collection of free templates, though the website is in German: http://www.joomlaos.de/joomla_template_galerie.html

JoomlaShack have a good collection of free templates, and template creation tutorials: http://www.joomlashack.com

SiteGround offer Joomla hosting and a good number of free Joomla Templates: http://www.siteground.com

A good collection of (hopefully) quality templates: http://www.joomla-templates.com/

Mambohut - templates based on Mambo which are also compatible with Joomla: http://www.mambohut.com/component/option,com_remository/Itemid,129/

Easy to browse templates with preview: http://www.joomlahacks.com/joomla/templates/0,0,0,0,9,0,8/

More Joomla Templates: http://www.joomlaresource.com/joomla_downloads/Download/Joomla_Templates/

Templates with lots of positions: http://www.dezinedepot.com/joomla/free-joomla-templates

Generic Templates site with a specific category for Joomla: http://www.themesbase.com/?category=Joomla

Joomla Templates from Italia: http://template.joomla.it/

Official Working Joomla Blog: http://www.joomla.org/content/blogcategory/19/51

IBoldDesign: 23 free templates (at the time of writing): http://www.iboldesign.com/component/option,com_remository/Itemid,31/

Professional Joomla Templates

Even though we have provided the above list of templates, in this case free is actually expensive because free templates can usually be recognised from miles away and make your website scream "cheap". Free templates will also not have any of the required features in the list below. We strongly recommend that you invest some money in buying a professional Joomla template. Below are a number of recommended sites offering Joomla templates at very good prices (usually less than $50).

Even though we recommend you buy a template, you will still have a particular drawback. Most of these templates will not be unique. Although you will probably customise the template to your website's brand, the template (or similar implementation of it) will probably feature in several other websites. Unique template design must either be done by yourself (or , or else outsourced to one of the companies below, however this will be usually quite expensive (around $1500)

What to look out for in a Commercial template

Optimized for SEO (this usually involves minimal use of tables and more use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Validate to XHTML / CSS W3C standards
Cross-browser compatibility
Support for updates (of future Joomla versions)
Design according to usability and accessibility standards
Ease of customisation
Availability of soruce files used to create templates in appropriate formats
Availability of usage guides
Number of available module positions

Joomlart

Our template (JA Pollux) was bought from JoomlaArt club. The good thing about this club is that you can subscribe to buy a 3 month membership. During this time you can download and try as many templates as you like. Also, Joomlart claim that they release 2 templates (or template updates) each month.

RocketTheme

When we were buying our template we had a difficult choice between, Joomlart, RocketTheme, and JoomlaShack. Take a look at RocketTheme templates ($50)