The WordPress default theme ships with every single download and installation of WordPress. While it’s come a very long way in features and design aesthetics since the early days of the Kubrick theme and others, it still leaves a lot to be desired.

The Good:

It’s free.
No hassle to install.
You can add your own custom header image.
You can change the background to an image or different color.
It has widgetized sidebars and footer.
It supports featured thumbnail images.
Really nice typography.
It works with just about any plugin or script for WordPress because they all use it as a “standard” for testing
Will teach you all sorts of nifty things about WordPress hooks and filters.

The Bad:

Everyone has it. Hard to feel unique or special, even with a custom header and background.
Makes it easy for hackers to find you and likely leaves some noticeable footprints in SEO if you believe in those types of things, especially since it is used on so many sites.
Doesn’t validate at w3schools – this is not major and easy to fix (and html 5 is still considered experimental anyways)
Not compatible with microformats – not everyone needs these or cares about them, but if you’re trying to do microformatting, and keep failing the Google Rich Snippets test, it’s because there is something called an hfeed class in the theme that Google’s rich snippets tool does not like!
Need to create a child theme if you customize it at all because it gets updated all the time
SEO still needs some tweaking – everyone has their own preferences on this. Personally, I like the SEO that comes packaged in the default theme, just because it makes me easier to outrank you if you use it It’s definitely “better than it was before”, so if you know nothing about SEO, you could probably still have good results with it. Hard core SEO’s will still have to modify quite a few things however.

The Ugly

The “ugliest” thing about the 2011 default theme, no doubt has to be the Pinecone Header Image. The significance of using a cropped photo of an ordinary pine cone is one I will likely never understand. I don’t have anything against pine cones, the photo itself, or the photographer – it just doesn’t make sense as a blog header photo, unless you’re writing a blog about camping. Otherwise, it really just makes no sense at all. While the other photos are not going to suit most blog topics either, they are at least a little more “generic”. I don’t know why, but when I see a pine cone I just instantly think of lumberjacks and forests and National Parks and Smokey the Bear. That’s not a good impression if you’re writing a blog about say, women’s fashion. Or technology topics.

The other thing that irks me is how BIG the featured header image is. It’s a popular design trend, I get it – but it’s not one I like very much. Those big photos could possibly add to the “wow” factor for some sites, but they also take up very valuable “above the fold” content space. So if your photo doesn’t grab them (or if its too generic or not relevant to the post image) – you’re going to see a high bounce rate.

I don’t know, I’m sure this seems petty to a lot of people, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. It’s probably just me. I think I only notice it just because of how many new site installs I do on a regular basis, and one week when my server got hacked into badly, I had all of my sites using the default theme “as-is” (which is a way better alternative than having my sites down for too long).

And the good news is the default theme does make it easy to add your own images instead – or even remove them completely

So anyways, those are my thoughts on the 2011 Default WordPress theme and things to consider if you are building websites and wondering whether you should use it or if you should instead get a different theme. It has some pros and cons to think about, but all in all a definite good starting point for your own theme development as well as decent enough to use if you want to start a site without wasting much time thinking about design.

What do you think of the 2011 WordPress theme? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.