Over the last months we’ve been observing a growing trend towards “premium” WordPress themes — themes designed by freelancers and design agencies, heavily advertised on popular weblogs and offered for a fixed price.

What’s The Point?

So what’s the point of purchasing a WordPress theme if there are zillions of alternatives? The quality. Amongst thousands of alternatives only few themes go beyond having some basic functionalities within a customized design. In fact, designing a professional WordPress theme takes time.

Free themes may help a designer to gain a good reputation and improve his/her search engine rankings (in fact, we review high-quality WordPress from time to time — 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes), but it’s understandable that designers often can’t afford themselves to use the time they might need for their job.

Consequently, you’ll rarely be able to find free professional themes which can be employed for large web-sites, such as online magazines or corporate web-sites.

Advantages vs. Disadvantages

In his recent article Kyle Scove has discussed the advantages of Premium WordPress themes:

“The availability of premium themes

• gives WordPress users a chance to stand out from the crowd of free themes,
• allows the purchaser to see what they are going to get ahead of time,
• benefits the designers by allowing them the opportunity to do the work once, then have a steady source of income trickle in
• will likely result in even more income than if they were to create a custom made theme for a client.”

In this context, it is also important to understand that designers will be able to benefit from a premium theme if and only if the premium theme has something special to offer and there are users who might actually need it. More importantly, it’s important that users are willing to pay for it — many bloggers tend to replace WordPress themes on a regular basis.

“Premium” themes are less likely to be used for traditional blogs. They are worth considering only if a large web-project has to be developed. Besides, not only the blog-owners, but also designers can benefit from such themes as they won’t need to reinvent the wheel all the time if they have to cope with a rather complex issue.

Case “Mimbo Pro”

Few months ago Darren Hoyt, the developer of the free Mimbo theme has announced that he is going to develop a premium version of his theme, called Mimbo Pro. As he attempts to create the theme that will look BIG, like another Time or Newsweek, but with more elegant design touches, customers with small budgets might find similar premium themes worth considering.

Usually the development of a magazine-style design from scratch would cost $10,000 - $40,000. In these cases “premium” themes might address the needs of clients with smaller budgets.

“Premium” Themes

Below we’ve selected some premium themes which are applicable for large web-projects. Using these templates, designers, developers and customers might avoid a lot of headache and save both time and money.

Revolution Theme (Price: $79.95)
The Revolution themes family comes in multiple flavors. Revolution Tech is a customizable theme ideal for tech/gadget online magazines and has a new enhanced featured video location on the theme. Revolution Magazine is a customizable theme ideal for online magazines and has a new enhanced featured video location on the theme.

Magazine News Theme (Price: $49 - $129)
Magazine News v1.0 is a news / magazine-styled WordPress theme created for sites with a lot of content, and looking to maximize their Google AdSense revenue. Among other things the theme has a “Feature article” functionality which allows bloggers to easily highlight an article at any time by creating a category called ‘featured’ and put the posts that you want featured in there.

PortfolioPress (Price: $49)
PortfolioPress is aimed at being a portfolio blog for web/graphic/print design. Apart from the theme, the package also includes layered Photoshop files (.psd) for header and menu and a full layered Photoshop file (.psd) (multiple license only).

Premium News Theme (Price: $99.95 - $249.95)
A grid-based magazine-style theme with a number of features such as video embedding, “featured article”-functionality etc.

News Theme (Price: $75 - $245)
A clean and legible magazine-style theme.

Showcase: WordPress CSS Gallery Theme (Price: $70 - $700)
WordPress theme created to power a CSS or web design gallery, which is also ideal for managing online portfolios and photo blogs. If you want to use WordPress as a web design gallery, Showcase might be the solution you’ve been looking for. Beyond its core features, it comes with 5 different color schemes and 8 layout variations.

WP Remix (Price: $55 - $155)
A WordPress theme which is completely customizable and comes bundled with many layout options that helps to create custom designs.

Digg-Theme (Price: $49)
The theme is widget-ready and it’s built in place for 125×125 banner ads, so that you can instantly incorporate ads in your blog.

Solostream 1.0 (Price: $49 - $159)
The theme is widget-ready, has drop-down navigation for sub-pages, tag support for WordPress 2.3, built-in archives page, drop-down boxes for categories and monthly archives, tabbed top content box and featured article functionality.

Gridline Magazine (Price: $49- $159)
Gridline utilizes the Blueprint CSS framework to create a minimal, grid-based magazine theme. Premium Gridline theme comes in two flavors, Gridline Magazine, and Gridline News. Designer mentions that Gridline might help you to :transform your blog into a full-blown magazine”.

What Do You Think?

As the number of premium themes is growing, it’s reasonable to pose the question whether it’s also the time for “premium” WordPress plugins. In a follow-up to this article Steven Snell from VandelayDesign team discusses the rise of premium themes and plugins. His opinon: “Currently plugin developers dedicate many hours of their time and are rewarded with links, maybe some donations, and a few pats on the back. If charging for plugins will open up increased innovation and creativity from plugin developers, I’m all for it.”

We’d like to know your opinion. Have you ever considered releasing a “premium” WordPress theme? Would you consider using “third-party” templates for your projects? How much would you spend on a professional WordPress theme? Are “premium” themes here to stay?

Please take part in our poll and/or comment on this article.

surveys - Take Our Poll

Sources and Resources

• Premium WordPress Themes Gallery
  An extensive recent overview of currently available premium themes.

Over the last months we’ve been observing a growing trend towards “premium” WordPress themes — themes designed by freelancers and design agencies, heavily advertised on popular weblogs and offered for a fixed price.

What’s The Point?

So what’s the point of purchasing a WordPress theme if there are zillions of alternatives? The quality. Amongst thousands of alternatives only few themes go beyond having some basic functionalities within a customized design. In fact, designing a professional WordPress theme takes time.

Free themes may help a designer to gain a good reputation and improve his/her search engine rankings (in fact, we review high-quality WordPress from time to time — 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes), but it’s understandable that designers often can’t afford themselves to use the time they might need for their job.

Consequently, you’ll rarely be able to find free professional themes which can be employed for large web-sites, such as online magazines or corporate web-sites.

Advantages vs. Disadvantages

In his recent article Kyle Scove has discussed the advantages of Premium WordPress themes:

“The availability of premium themes

• gives WordPress users a chance to stand out from the crowd of free themes,
• allows the purchaser to see what they are going to get ahead of time,
• benefits the designers by allowing them the opportunity to do the work once, then have a steady source of income trickle in
• will likely result in even more income than if they were to create a custom made theme for a client.”

In this context, it is also important to understand that designers will be able to benefit from a premium theme if and only if the premium theme has something special to offer and there are users who might actually need it. More importantly, it’s important that users are willing to pay for it — many bloggers tend to replace WordPress themes on a regular basis.

“Premium” themes are less likely to be used for traditional blogs. They are worth considering only if a large web-project has to be developed. Besides, not only the blog-owners, but also designers can benefit from such themes as they won’t need to reinvent the wheel all the time if they have to cope with a rather complex issue.

Case “Mimbo Pro”

Few months ago Darren Hoyt, the developer of the free Mimbo theme has announced that he is going to develop a premium version of his theme, called Mimbo Pro. As he attempts to create the theme that will look BIG, like another Time or Newsweek, but with more elegant design touches, customers with small budgets might find similar premium themes worth considering.

Usually the development of a magazine-style design from scratch would cost $10,000 - $40,000. In these cases “premium” themes might address the needs of clients with smaller budgets.

“Premium” Themes

Below we’ve selected some premium themes which are applicable for large web-projects. Using these templates, designers, developers and customers might avoid a lot of headache and save both time and money.

Revolution Theme (Price: $79.95)
The Revolution themes family comes in multiple flavors. Revolution Tech is a customizable theme ideal for tech/gadget online magazines and has a new enhanced featured video location on the theme. Revolution Magazine is a customizable theme ideal for online magazines and has a new enhanced featured video location on the theme.

Magazine News Theme (Price: $49 - $129)
Magazine News v1.0 is a news / magazine-styled WordPress theme created for sites with a lot of content, and looking to maximize their Google AdSense revenue. Among other things the theme has a “Feature article” functionality which allows bloggers to easily highlight an article at any time by creating a category called ‘featured’ and put the posts that you want featured in there.

PortfolioPress (Price: $49)
PortfolioPress is aimed at being a portfolio blog for web/graphic/print design. Apart from the theme, the package also includes layered Photoshop files (.psd) for header and menu and a full layered Photoshop file (.psd) (multiple license only).

Premium News Theme (Price: $99.95 - $249.95)
A grid-based magazine-style theme with a number of features such as video embedding, “featured article”-functionality etc.

News Theme (Price: $75 - $245)
A clean and legible magazine-style theme.

Showcase: WordPress CSS Gallery Theme (Price: $70 - $700)
WordPress theme created to power a CSS or web design gallery, which is also ideal for managing online portfolios and photo blogs. If you want to use WordPress as a web design gallery, Showcase might be the solution you’ve been looking for. Beyond its core features, it comes with 5 different color schemes and 8 layout variations.

WP Remix (Price: $55 - $155)
A WordPress theme which is completely customizable and comes bundled with many layout options that helps to create custom designs.

Digg-Theme (Price: $49)
The theme is widget-ready and it’s built in place for 125×125 banner ads, so that you can instantly incorporate ads in your blog.

Solostream 1.0 (Price: $49 - $159)
The theme is widget-ready, has drop-down navigation for sub-pages, tag support for WordPress 2.3, built-in archives page, drop-down boxes for categories and monthly archives, tabbed top content box and featured article functionality.

Gridline Magazine (Price: $49- $159)
Gridline utilizes the Blueprint CSS framework to create a minimal, grid-based magazine theme. Premium Gridline theme comes in two flavors, Gridline Magazine, and Gridline News. Designer mentions that Gridline might help you to :transform your blog into a full-blown magazine”.

What Do You Think?

As the number of premium themes is growing, it’s reasonable to pose the question whether it’s also the time for “premium” WordPress plugins. In a follow-up to this article Steven Snell from VandelayDesign team discusses the rise of premium themes and plugins. His opinon: “Currently plugin developers dedicate many hours of their time and are rewarded with links, maybe some donations, and a few pats on the back. If charging for plugins will open up increased innovation and creativity from plugin developers, I’m all for it.”

We’d like to know your opinion. Have you ever considered releasing a “premium” WordPress theme? Would you consider using “third-party” templates for your projects? How much would you spend on a professional WordPress theme? Are “premium” themes here to stay?

Please take part in our poll and/or comment on this article.

surveys - Take Our Poll

Sources and Resources

• Premium WordPress Themes Gallery
  An extensive recent overview of currently available premium themes.

In this article we present 100 free high-quality WordPress themes. Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects. Links to demo-versions provide a direct preview of a theme.

Please notice that the listed WordPress themes are presented in 8 sections: vibrant themes, simple & minimalistic themes, magazine style, grid-based, clean and legible, advanced, experimental, photoblog & videoblog.

You might also want to take a look at our previous selections:

• 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes
  An overview of beautiful, but rather unknown themes you might have missed.
• 21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant Themes
  A quite pretty selection of elegant yet well thought-out themes.
• 10 Fresh and Clean Themes
  The beauty of these themes lies in their clean look supported by a legible content presentation.

You want them — you get them. This page may take a while to load; therefore please be patient and don’t hit “Reload” too often.

1. Vibrant WordPress Themes

PFO Stripes [ Demo ]

PFO Business [ Demo ]

FFF Lemon Twist (Demo and Download)

Several3 [ Demo ]

Adreu r2 [ Demo ]

Blogging Pro Theme [ Demo ]

DM-Bloodless [ Demo]

Illacrimo [ Demo ]

Elixir

Insense [ Demo ]

Zeke 1.0 [ Demo ]

jsTheme
Comes with a number of themes.

Smashing Theme [ Demo ]

DarkRed [ Demo ]

Gossip City [ Demo ]

Resurrection

Blue Steel

River Run

Yoghourt

Midsight Red & Brown[ Demo ]
The original page was virus-infected, the link is replaced with its text-version until the site will be cleaned.

Fluid Yellow Black

xPlosive Reloaded [ Demo ]

Red Stamp [ Demo ]

Dilectio [ Demo ]

Fauna

dfMarine [ Demo ]

Curved WordPress Theme [ Demo ]

Accord WordPress Theme [ Demo ]

2. Simple, Minimalistic Themes

iA

Modicus 0.2

Modern [ Demo ]

Documentation [ Demo ]

Jentri [ Demo ]

miniBits [ Demo ]

GIMP Style

Dayvan Theme [ Demo ]

Tree Theme [Demo ]

DePo Clean WordPress Theme [ Demo ]

BlueBird 1.0

Balance

Paisley [ Demo ]

Autumn

Brilliance [ Demo ]

Pixelate

Pockett [ Demo ]

Artuell [ Demo ]

Plane Jane

Briny

Elite

Blue Moon

3. Magazine Style WordPress Themes

WP Premium [ Demo ]

Modicus Remix

Morning After

Futurosity Magazine [ Demo ]

Structure Wordpress Theme [ Demo ]

Visionary Wordpress Theme [ Demo ]

WP Polaroid [ Demo ]

Overstand Theme

Jello Wala Mello Wordpress Theme

4. Grid-Based WordPress Themes

Gridline Lite [ Demo ]

Refreshed: Grid Focus

5. Calm, Clean and Legible Themes

Sharpfolio

Coldblue

Cubismo [ Demo ]

Yomel [ Demo ]

Lust Wordpress Theme

Abstractia [ Demo ]

HemingwayEx [ Demo ]

Blubbr

Ayumi [ Demo ]

Greenway 3C

K2-U3 [ Demo ]

OldLamp [ Demo ]

Prima [ Demo ]

ProSense

Insan [ Demo ]

Sakeena [ Demo ]

Margot

The Azure Hut

Livegreen [ Demo ]

Simpress [ Demo ]

Glued Ideas: Subtle [ Demo ]

Gluttony [ Demo ]

6. Advanced WordPress Themes

ExtJS Wordpress Theme

Lounge2

Prebuilt

Neoclassical
A 3-column template system with rotating header images.

7. Experimental Themes

Bonsai, Red Growth Live
Big typography dominates.

Trevilian Way [ Demo ]

BrainTied 1.0 [ Demo ]
The front page displays only the list of recent posts.

Tropical Grunge [ Demo ]

Aspire

Isolated Theme [ Demo ]

Supermini

Fontella
The front page features only the main/recent post of the weblog.

ASCII Themes

Retro Mac OS X [ Demo ]

8. Photoblog & Videoblog Themes

Tumblelog For WordPress [ Demo ]

Nautilus

Nishita [ Demo ]

9. Sources and Further Resources

• WordPress Themes That Don’t Suck
• BlogPerfume WordPress Themes
• 48 SEO WordPress Themes
• Skinpress.com
• WPDesigner.com
• Clazh.com
• Best WordPress Magazine Themes
• ScribbleScratch.com
• Photoblog Themes

Head to forwebdesigners.com (the name says it all, doesn’t it?) and start browsing and downloading.

A word of advice: you can spend so much time browsing cool stuff that you may end up doing nothing. But you probably know the feeling if you’re reading this.

This time I’ve gone for a much simpler design sticking to one column layout ditching the side navigation bar.

Another new concept on the blog is the aggregation of some of the many platforms where I publish contents: twitter, del.icio.us and the public part of my Google news reader.

Whether it’s a post written specifically for the blog, a bookmark on del.icio.us, a tweet or a shared article in Google reader, they all are treated equal: the latest one becomes the latest post and takes the place at the top of the page (even a small tweet). Sources outside Wordpress are syndicated automagically using the Feed Wordpress plugin (not perfect though as it produces more often than not duplicate entries).

A lot of time has been invested in Information Architecture and graphic design. At a latter stage I also integrated some of the jQuery framework capabilities. I’m afrait that I just scratched the surface but it’s clear to me that jQuery is really powerful and well architectured framework. In future projects I’ll keep it in mind as early as design time as it can really influence the interface and thus the Information Architecture.

As we all know we don’t live in a perfect world. If we did we’d all be using Firefox (or any W3C compliant web browser). The last days have been invested wasted in tweaking and hacking the CSS for Internet Explorer 6 and trying to work some magic out of the hideous browser. All credit goes to Rudewoikz.

All in all a very happy new start for an ordinary blogger.

Final note: Please make life easier by using Firefox!