Have you ever wanted to create a premium WordPress theme? I’m sure we’ve all noticed an explosion in this market over the past few months due to the income potential, but I’ve also noticed a bad trend that I’d like to talk a little bit about. That trend is the very un-premium quality of many of these new themes being released, as well as a extreme lack of innovation put into creating these themes.

Many of the top designers in this market launched their sites back in late 2007 and quickly established their own niche. Since then, they have continued to release new themes, but they tend to shift their focus to a different type of end-user with each new theme. Newcomers seem to build very similar news/magazine themes that really aren’t all that different than what is already available. I don’t think to many people looking for a news or magazine theme are going to have any trouble filling their needs with what is already available, so place your focus somewhere else, or provide something in your theme that the competition doesn’t have.

In addition to picking out a niche to build your business around, there are also some things you should consider before releasing a premium WordPress theme. Long time readers know that I’ve been following the premium WordPress themes market pretty closely since last November when it really started to pick up steam, and I’ve noticed several (easily fixable) mistakes web designers are making when trying to compete in this very competitive market. Below I’ve collected a few of these things that you should have in place before you launch your theme:

1. Theme Support - This is by far the most important way to find success. When you charge for your theme, it raises the stakes, and buyers need to know that you will be there for them if they run into problems with your theme. You need to setup Forums for buyers to use and you need to be very active on them.
2. Offer Theme Updates - As time goes by the internet evolves and WordPress evolves with it. You’ll want to re-evaluate your premium themes every few months and make updates, add features, etc. Then offer a free upgrade to all previous buyers.
3. Browser Compatibility - A new designer recently tried to enter this market with a theme that did not display properly in Internet Explorer 6. It is fairly unprofessional to release a free theme that doesn’t display properly in all browsers (in my opinion), but its free so you can sometimes get away with it. The second you start charging for your services, you’ll have to provide a fully compatible theem.
4. Valid Code - Just like browser compatibility, it is unprofessional to release code that isn’t valid and shows a lot about you as a web designer.
5. Advertising - As I said above, this is a very competitive market now, and the PPC rates have gone up considerably in the last couple months. How much will you pay-per-click? Sometimes you have to spend money to make money.
6. Affiliate Program - With the cost of PPC advertising being so high, what better way to market your product than to offer an affiliate program? This helps encourage bloggers to promote your product and you only have to make a payment if a sale is made. If you decide to go this route, make sure to create some banners for affiliates to use (125×125, 300×250 at least) and I recommend using E-Junkie to manage your affiliate program for you. It only costs a few dollars a month and they handle all the work, including billing and providing download links to the buyer.
7. Give Away Theme Copies - Contact some large blogs with a big following and offer a few copies of your theme to give away to readers via a contest, etc, in exchange for a review. You could also offer the author a copy in exchange for a review. If you go this route, think about your target audience and find blogs in that niche. A good place to start is with blogs about blogging or WordPress.
8. Innovation - Do something different. Target a specific niche. Don’t just add another news/magazine theme to the list that is growing larger each day.

As you can see, there is a lot more to being successful in this market than simply offering a free theme. I think if you look at the three most successful premium theme authors, you’ll see a lot of the above.

So, anything you would add? I know most of the premium theme designers read this blog and I would love to get their input. What about buyers of these themes? What do you look for when purchasing one a premium WordPress theme?

Edit: PJ has provided a bunch of other responsibilities in the comments that were so good that I felt they warranted being added to the original post:

1. Control Panel Options - Adding the ability to customize your theme from the control panel is a great option. At a minimum, buyers should be able to plug in their Feedburner feed information from the control panel.
2. Provide Tutorials - Providing tutorials to buyers is a great way to show you support your theme.
3. Multiple Color Schemes - Offering several different stylesheets to choose from as a great way to widen the appeal of your theme. This helps buyers use their favorite colors and make their sites/blogs look more original.

Did that title get your attention? While most of the Revolution themes still require payment, it looks like Brian Gardner has made another contribution to the WordPress community, this time with a free 3-column and widget-ready version of Revolution.

Because this theme is designed more for an end-user than to serve as a template for a web designer, the first thing you’ll notice about the free Revolution theme is the large amount of color Brian used.   Brian has also talked about adding additional stylesheets to the theme, given you an easy way to pick your own color for the theme.

Here is a screen shot of the free Revolution theme:

As you can see above, Brian stays true to the Revolution series with this theme.

If you’d like to get a copy for yourself, you can now demo the theme or download the free Revolution theme.

As a side note, it looks like iThemes has also released their own set of 8 new free WordPress themes.

This guest post was written by Leland of Theme Lab, where he has released over 50 WordPress themes. In addition to themes, Theme Lab also provides some WordPress guides. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Sometimes you may not want your search results to be limited by the confines of the standard WordPress Loop. This is a quick code hack to allow a search to return unlimited results, altering the standard WordPress Loop by using a custom query. You can do this in a few different ways. If you have a search template, in search.php you can simple add the following line of code above your Loop.

Find:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Add:

<?php $posts=query_posts($query_string . '&posts_per_page=-1'); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Make sure you put this code in your search.php only, unless you want unlimited posts on your index or archive pages. The -1 you see can be changed to any positive integer to limit the posts to a number you choose as well.

If you don’t have a search.php in your theme, the next level down in the Template Hierarchy is your Main Index Template, or index.php. You can use a conditional tag for the same effect.

For this we’ll use the same code as above, except wrap it in the is_search() conditional tag, like so:

<?php if (is_search()) { $posts=query_posts($query_string . '&posts_per_page=-1'); } ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

You can use this technique to change the standard Loop limitations of archives, categories, tag pages, and even your main index template - but it would probably be easier to simply change your reading settings for that.

If you are a WordPress designer, are you using conditional tags in your themes? For those unfamiliar with them, conditional tags are snippets of PHP code you can easily use to set up conditions where the code is used. The most common use for these would be for your sidebar or your pre/post meta sections of your posts where you display your post details. With conditional tags, you can display certain functions only on pages of your choice. A couple of months ago we talked a little bit about WordPress conditional tags on this site and when to use them, but we didn’t get into a great amount of detail.

Leland over at Theme Lab has been working on some great WordPress guides lately, and one of his recent posts that caught my attention is the Ultimate Guide to WordPress Conditional Tags. This post provides a more thorough explanation of conditional tags and how to use them. If you’ve been wanting to improve your coding, this would be a great post to check out.

A few days ago, I ran across another great free WordPress theme over at Daily Blog Tips.   If you don’t want to purchase a theme, I would definitely pick out some of the themes they’ve been releasing recently.  This particular theme is called PassionDuo, and it has a lot of the quality that I look for in a free WordPress theme.

Here are the features the author lists that are associated with PassionDuo:

• Advertising ready: The theme comes with a 468×60 banner spot on the header, and 6 125×125 spots on top of the sidebar. It should also be easy to integrate ad units of other sizes throughout the theme.
• Feedburner Integration: The theme has an options page where you can simply paste your Feedburner feed URL. It also comes with a styled email subscription form, where you just need to put your Feedburner email id.
• Comments Styling: The author comments already come with a different style so that readers can easily identify them.
• Search Engine Optimization: As usual the title and meta tags have already been optimized. The categories and archive pages are also structured to display only post excerpts.

In addition to these great features, you will also get the choice of either green, red, or blue.   Here is a screen shot of the green version:

If you’re interested, here is the demo and download information:

Green: Demo | Download

Red: Demo | Download

Blue: Demo | Download

I will be adding this theme to the appropriate WordPress theme galleries.

Sometimes it is fun to look back, and today I want to take a quick look back at the early stages of blogging, and examine the relevance of a term that many of you are probably familiar with…trackbacks.  Flash back six years ago when blogging was a very new idea and had yet to develop into what we have today. 

Before comments really caught on, it was common for a blog post’s conversation to spill over to several blogs, because bloggers would post their “comment” on their own weblog and give their takes.  The problem was, this often made it difficult for a reader to follow conversations.  As a result, the trackback was invented by the team over at Six Apart for their Movable Type software (and eventually Typepad, etc.).   Eventually, other blogging software (include WordPress) adopted this method so readers could see a post, then see who was talking about it.

In the years since then, pingbacks were created to be easier to send are less vulnerable to spam.  People that don’t have a blog will usually leave comments.  To me, this begs the question…do we really need trackbacks any longer?  When was the last time you received one that wasn’t spam?   In my opinion, blogging has outgrown the trackback and the pingback has made it irrelevant. 

As for the pingback, I think it is great for now.   I do think, however, that we are headed towards blogs using something like a Google Blog Search or Technorati to display on each individual blog page a ”who is talking about this post” module, which would make the pingback fairly irrelevant as well.   All it would take is for Google to put a little more focus in improving their Google Blog Search or Technorati to narrow their focus in this type of area so that page load times wouldn’t take a drastic hit.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble, but I figured I would throw it out there and get your thoughts on trackbacks and where blogging is headed in the future.