Friday we took a look at a large variety of news and magazine premium WordPress themes, and yesterday we took a look at small business premium WordPress themes. Today I wanted to cover my favorite type of premium WordPress theme, this time focusing specifically on the premium blog WordPress themes.

When the premium WordPress market was originally formed, pretty much every theme was focused specifically on behaving like a content management system. There were some great themes released, but it always surprised me that there didn’t seem to be any real premium blog themes for sale. Fortunately in the six months since then a few nice premium blog themes have been released and they really do a great job of taking your blog to the next level.

I expect this area of the premium WordPress market to continue to grow, so this post will probably receive a lot of updates over the coming months. Enjoy!

Blubs Theme

• Clean and Elegant Design
• 2 columns flexible layout
• Navigation Dropdown Menu
• Widgets ready on sidebar
• Serach bar at the top
• Ready for125px and 250px ads integration
• Separated comments/trackbacks
• Built-in gravatars in comment section
• Print.css stylesheet
• Author Profiles & Archives
• Clean & valid codes - XHTML 1.0 Strict + CSS 2.1
• Cross browser compatible - tested on IE/Win, Opera, Firefox, Safari/Win.

Single-Use ($49.95), Multiple-Use ($99.00)

Source/Demo | Purchase

Omni theme

Single-Use ($79.95, Multiple-Use ($199.99), 4-1 Pack ($299.95)

Source/Demo | Purchase

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Yesterday we took a look at some of the best news and magazine premium WordPress themes.   Today I wanted to take a look at another area of the premium WordPress themes market, this time focusing on the themes being designed specifically for small businesses in mind. 

Some small business premium WordPress themes are created with very specific businesses in mind, while most can easily be adapted to just about any small business that needs a content management system or business blog setup.    I’ve attempted to feature all types of small business themes below.

Revolution Pro Business Theme

• Featured homepage with section for recent company news
• Featured section page with area to focus on latest blog posts
• Blog sidebar to accommodate 125×125 advertising banners
• eNews & Updates section configurable with Feedburner
• Google AdSense integration in between posts and comments
• Section, Archive, Blog page templates

Single-Use ($79.95), Multiple-Use ($199.95)

Source/Demo | Purchase

Essence Theme (6 Color Combinations to Choose From)

• 7 inside page layouts
• Elegant look and feel of traditional website
• Static home page
• Integrated blog templates
• Two header options: Text or graphic

Single-Use ($79.95), Multiple-Use ($249.95)

Source/Demo | Purchase

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As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the things Hack WordPress is most known for is our WordPress theme galleries.   Because of this, we have worked really hard to maintain them by both adding new themes as they are released, as well as removing older themes that are either outdated, are no longer available, or are no longer supported by their authors.  

One of the most common requests I get via our contact form is to break apart our galleries into more of a niche focused display of WordPress themes.  Because we aim to serve, this post will be the first of a three part series breaking down the premium WordPress themes available.    Next we will be going through our free galleries and looking for more helpful ways to display those as well.

This first WordPress gallery was designed to feature some of the best News and Magazine Premium WordPress themes currently available for purchase.  I included both styles because the lines are kind of blurred between the two and I didn’t want any debate over which category each one falls under.  Themes are not listed in any particular order and I have included any listed features with the theme whenever it was possible. 

Future galleries will include premium blog themes and premium business themes.   Enjoy!

Revolution Pro Media Theme

• Featured homepage tabber area
• Featured photos from Flickr
• Featured YouTube video
• Other featured areas using custom fields
• Google AdSense integration in between posts and comments
• Section, Archive, Blog page templates

Single-Use ($79.95), Multiple-Use ($199.95)

Source/Demo | Purchase

Mimbo Pro Theme

• Control panel options for Google Analytics and Feedburner, logo and header image management, homepage categories, optional color schemes, and advertisement management
• Custom templates for categories, archives, authors, sitemap, search results
• Auto-resizing for images
• Built-in contact form
• HTML controls for comments (bold, italics, blockquote, link)
• Print-friendly options on single-post pages
• Two widgetized sidebars with optional advertising
• Tabbed and separated comments/trackbacks
• Built-in gravatars and author highlighting
• Cookie crumbs on single-post pages
• Print.css stylesheet
• Optional microformats in the footer

Single-use ($88.95), Multiple-use ($199.95)

Source/Demo | Purchase

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This guest post was written by Hayes Potter, a 13 year old programmer and web developer that gives webmasters tips on protecting their website from common hacking techniques. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

I absolutely love the i3 WordPress theme. I used it for my site for about a month, and I had no problems for what I needed. It features a “mac” look, has the Mac OS X classic background that fades into the mac’s “spotlight blue”. The sidebars are on the left and right side not attached to the middle content. The separate widgets are each in their own little bubble with a mac like toolbar as the header. The theme displays the pages in the middle content column, and this is one of the very rare themes that display the sub-pages very nicely under the page parent. Also you can move around the columns to your liking, so instead of the content being in the middle you can have it off to the right and the sidebars on the left, and vice versa.

If you are on the photos section it would display a small little bar under the pages bar displaying the sub pages, but if you are on the home page it will not display these sub pages. It has a built-in search bar in the top right hand corner, and it looks like the spotlight application in Mac OS X 10.4 and higher, except its black. The only problem I’ve ever had with it is displaying javascript in sidebar, ad- sense would fine, but a simple javascript code would make the sidebar screw up and shift to the bottom of the page. I switched themes because of that and because it is a very popular theme, and I like to switch up my theme every once in a while.

I highly recommend using this theme if you can’t find a better theme for yourself. Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day!

If you run a small company and are still shopping for the right premium WordPress theme for your webpage, the iThemes team has just released a new themes for companies called iCompany. As with their other themes designed for businesses, this one comes with a lot of the features that a small business often looks for:

• Easily customizable
• Integrated blog
• Home page template
• Wide layout for content heavy sites
• Widget ready sidebars and feature areas
• Drop-down navigation
• Search engine optimized

Here is an idea of how the theme looks:

As with most of the themes available at iThemes, the iCompany theme is available at the very competitive price of $29.95.   Not a bad price for an pre-built website/blog!

It has been awhile since I’ve created one of our popular WordPress theme galleries, so I decided it was time to build a new one. In the past I’ve always taken the approach of trying to remove any personal bias and just display the WordPress themes and demo/download information in a manageable way so that the reader can choose their favorite themes that they’d like to use.

This time I decided to comb through the internet and pick out my personal favorite 50 free WordPress themes. Right now, they are broken down into the following categories: 2-Column Themes, 3-Column Themes, 4-Column Themes, and Magazine Themes. I’m pretty sure not everyone will agree with my choices, so if I missed one of your favorites, feel free to add a link to the theme in the comments below.

Best 2-Column Free WordPress Themes

PassionDuo Theme (3 Colors)

Green: Demo | Download, Red: Demo | Download, Blue: Demo | Download

Lemon Twist Theme

Source/Demo | Download

WP Freemium Theme

Source | Download

SimpleWP Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Evolution Theme

Source | Download | Demos: Blue, Green, Red

GlossyBlue Theme

Source | Download | Demo

StudioPress Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Several3 Theme

Source | Download | Demo [Continue Reading...]