I’m using the Pagemash plug-in, which works well with the theme. This allows for easy organization of the cascading menus at the top. This is what I want for my church website with its static pages.

Previously I tested LivingOS Upsilon, which is really cool with the SmoothGallery slideshow. However, the top menu on that theme doesn’t cascade to show the page hierarchy. Additionally, when you use CTRL++ (Control-Plus) to increase the text size (as I often do), the labels grow out of their fixed-sized boxes (more like a background).

The menus and other text behave themselves in Atahualpa, which looks less cool but is more browser-friendly.

I settled on these options after shortlisting some by these factors:

• overall look (colours, style) – I wanted a clean, simple look
• layout (nav menu, sidebars, header) – I wanted top nav, 2 or 3 columns
• functions (e.g. SmoothGallery) – not particular here, depending on practicality

After playing around, I realized other things may also affect the decision, such as whether the theme has a dedicated theme editor (like Atahualpa), or whether you have to go into the CSS and files to change things yourself. For example, I managed to change the background colours for Upsilon, but only by editing the individual graphics in the GIMP. I can imagine how inconvenient it would be if requested to “just make it a slightly darker shade” – “Well, you can use your monitor’s brightness control…” Atahualpa offers colour previews in its option boxes, after you key in a hex code. Only certain things can be adjusted, but tweaking those is very easy. Sometimes you don’t need total control; for me, a functional level will do.

There are so many free themes out there, but these are my experiences working with these two.