14 DAY TRIAL // Using WordPress.com instead of hosting your own WordPress install comes with advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it's completely free and it's mostly hassle free. On the other, you are more limited in what you can do with your blog and what it looks like.
Still, WordPress.com does come with plenty of free and paid themes to choose from to make your blog stand out, and now it's making it easier to discover them.
WordPress.com now offers 200 themes so choosing the right one can take some time, especially if you have to go back and forth from the theme preview page to the theme list.
Thankfully, the new Theme Showcase uses much larger thumbnails for the theme screenshots making it easier to judge them at a glance and weed out the really ugly ones. If one catches your eyes, you can click through to check it out in more detail.
But if not, the infinite scroll option should come in handy. The Showcase only loads 20 themes at a time, so the first page loads faster than ever. But as you scroll down, more themes are loaded, as needed.
In the same vein, searches now act more like filters so you don't have to go through several pages just to see some results.
Just type in what you want in the search box, hit Enter and check out the results. If you don't like them, enter a new query and repeat the process. In all this time, you'll be staying on the same page.
What's more, like the rest of the site, the new theme thumbnails are HiDPI or Retina Display ready, which means they should look great if you are running one of the new MacBook Pr’s, an iPad 3 or simply have a ridiculously large resolution display.
