Although he’s not new to the world of premium WordPress themes (this site is run by the same person that made the popular WP-Remix theme), it looks like his newest project, Premium Themes dot Net, has finally launched and is available to the WordPress community.

At launch, there is currently over 20 premium WordPress themes available, with a total of 50 that are in the works. Here is what the author had to say about this new site:

The premium themes market seems promising and there are new paid themes popping up every day. However, not every paid theme is of premium quality and many of them are not even worth paying. While there are numerous themes that are of good quality - available for free download, there are not many paid themes on offer that are meant for just blog. If corporate people or Individual professional wants to have a super high design, they have to pay for a custom design which may or may not match their exact needs.Dear reader, I am happy to announce http://premiumthemes.net/ - the home of premium quality free and paid themes. Each and every theme on this site is/will be exclusively designed, strategically coded and commented, SEO optimized, with theme admin options, widget-ready, supporting famous plug ins, documented, good support and more… and yet, they will all be unbelievably affordable!

As mentioned in my other blogs before few days, I studied hundreds of wordpress powered blogs to study the basic need of professional bloggers & corporate companies and I have been preparing high quality premium themes for wordpress since long.

Finally, I have around 50 premium theme designs ready to go online. To start with, I am introducing 25 themes for sale at this site. And just in next week, I will be giving away two quality wordpress themes to the wordpress community.

I will be also highlighting more features of the themes for sale at this site next week. Till then, have a nice time!

So far, in browsing through the themes available, there are a few nice themes you can purchase, and they are all available at a very affordable price. You can get a single license use of most of the themes for somewhere between $29.00-$49.00 and most developer’s licenses run for $129.00 and up.

In my personal opinion, you can tell the author put a lot of work into them, but I’m not sure these are quite up to the quality you’ll see over at Revolution, Solostream, or Premium News. Then again, you are paying less than half the price for them.

The biggest difference I see is that Premium Themes seems to aim to sell their themes to people looking for something that is ready to go right out of the box, while many of the themes I just mentioned instead focus on providing a great theme template that can easily be customized to look how you want it to. They also tend to focus on being ready for blogs, where the other themes seem to focus on being a Content Management System (CMS).

Interested in digging through the themes available? Check out Premium Themes dot Net.

With the much anticipated upcoming release of WordPress 2.5, a lot of people are nervous about the new WordPress admin dashboard that we’ve heard some bad reviews of.  I personally have seen some demos and I’m not overly enthusiastic about the changes either.  Luckily we’ve got a great WordPress community!

Once you’ve made your WordPress 2.5 upgrade, if you find you are unhappy with the new dashboard, you now have the option of using a WordPress plugin!  DeanJRobinson has released a new WordPress plugin for WordPress 2.5 called Fluency Admin that will create an incredible dashboard for you to use.  Here are some screenshots:

Fluency Admin Homepage

Fluency Admin Post Page

I’ve gone ahead and uploaded this plugin so it is an option once I’ve made my WordPress 2.5 upgrade (hopefully this week!).  Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Have you ever wondered how to create a directory in WordPress?  Performancing recently did a great job tackling this subject in a lengthy post about Building Web Directories in WordPress.

Among the methods covered in this post are two great WordPress plugins for creating a web directory.  The plugins mentioned are the Link Directory Plugin and the WP-Directory Plugin.  It is unclear, however, if either works with the most recent version of WordPress.  If you’ve tried either, please confirm in the comments below.

If you want to learn more about web directories and WordPress, I recommend you click over to get the full details.

If you ever scroll down in your WordPress dashboard, you’ve probably noticed some back and forth over the past week between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Anil Dash, who is the Vice President of Six Apart, which is responsible for Movable Type and Typepad.

So what is this argument all about?  Daily Blog Tips has been tracking the dialogs between the two in their post Movable Type vs. WordPress, showing that things have started to get a little heated.  So which is better?   I’ve never used Movable Type and this blog is dedicated to WordPress, so I don’t feel that I’m qualified to comment.

Have you used both?  Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

In the past I’ve talked about some great WordPress plugins for backing up your database.   This is a great way to backup your WordPress blog for people that don’t know how to do it manually.   You can also set it up to do your backup automatically, which I find extremely useful because I run several websites that need backed up.

Throughout the past few years I been fortunate to meet a lot of bloggers, and I’ve found that many prefer to avoid plugins as much as possible, or sometimes they are just the kind of people that like to be hands on and learn how to do things themselves.   For these people, Performancing recently posted a Bloggers Guide To Safely Backing Up Your WordPress Site, where they detail the steps you need to take to manually backup your WordPress blog.

As a quick note, if you decide you want to manually backup your WordPress blog, you’ll first need to make sure you have FTP access for your website and the ability to access your Control Panel (CPanel).   From there you will want to follow the steps in Performancing’s guide to create a backup of your posts and a backup of your database.

I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t sad to see a post pop up in my feed reader today that WPDesigner.com is for sale. Small Potato has been a major part of the WordPress community and has developed quite the following. Not only has he been quite successful, but according to the WordPress Top 40, it looks like he has the #1 ranked WordPress blog, including a PageRank of 7.  On a personal level, he has touched a number of lives.

According to Small Potato, regarding the decision to sell WPDesigner:

If you’ve been reading this blog and my personal blog, you know the first and main reason is I’ll be traveling abroad for the rest of this year. Initially, I was hoping I could juggle traveling, maintaining this blog, and continue creating WordPress themes, but that’s more than likely not the case. Because of that, I’d rather hand Wpdesigner.com to a solid team of developers with enough man hours and better management skills to do this site justice.

Second reason is I’m at a crossroad in life. In the last two months, I changed my love and family lives. Now, it’s time to make career choices; I don’t have to, but I want to make a change. Although I still have the desire to compete with fellow WordPress theme authors, I would love to have the time and opportunities to explore and actually get away from the computer (my lower back acts like it’s 90 years old, but it’s actually 21). Letting go of Wpdesigner, sadly, will leave room for me to do that. (I’ll probably become a fisherman at one of the Thailand islands. I kid. I kid.)

Third reason is I don’t like giving theme support. Hahaha.

The website developer in me says “Wow, what an incredible domain name and great price for an established site,” but truthfully I am saddened by this news. When I think about people that have contributed the most to the advancement of WordPress, Small Potato is towards the top of that list with Matt, Lorelle, and some other great company. He’s always been very helpful and always tended to take a creative approach to things, whether it was his blog, theme club, or whatever else.

Small Potato, best of luck to you in your travels. The next owner has a lot to live up to!