Over the past 4 months since Premium News was launched, Adii and friends have been developing a strong presence in the premium WordPress themes niche.

It all started with the Premium News theme where bloggers were given their first taste of what a news CMS using WordPress can look like. In the time since then, many themes have followed, with the most recent additions (Flash News and Gazette Editions) quickly rising in popularity. Now today it looks like the newest Premium News theme is available, this time being released as a series.

This series is called the Live Wire series, and here are some of the features you can expect in this addition:

• Auto Image Resizer - No more do you need to upload various sizes of images to make the featured posts and thumbnails look great - instead you now only upload one image of any size and our back-end does the rest.
• Author Profiles - We focused a lot of attention and making the author profiles and archives in this theme, really, really pop. This feature makes the Live Wire theme perfectly suited to multi-author blogs. We also included our built-in Gravatar support to display author thumb images.
• Built-in Gravatars - As mentioned above, we’ve included Gravatar functionality into the theme and it works without you having to install a plugin. The use of Gravatars can also be easily switched on and off.
• Custom Page Templates - The theme now includes custom page templates for General Archives, a Sitemap and Image Galleries.
• Color Schemes - Every theme also includes 4 different color schemes to cater for everyone’s taste!
• The Rest - Featured panel, video panel, drop-down menu’s, a tabbed box in the sidebar, integrated banner ad management and lastly easily integrated Flickr & Feedburner.

Here are some screen shots of the new series:

Live Wire 2.0

Live Wire Edition

Live Wire Style

What is the price? True to the previous pricing structure, these themes are $99.95 each for a single-use license. If you would rather purchase a developer’s license, you can get that for $249.95. All three themes are interchangeable, and purchasers of the developers license will get all 12 styles!

Check out the Live Wire Premium News Themes

If you’ve been looking for a premium quality WordPress theme, but don’t want to fork over the cash for one, you can sometimes get lucky and win one in a contest or giveaway.

Today I noticed that Blog oh Blog is giving away two free copies of MoneyBlogger, which is their popular premium WordPress theme. How do you enter? Just write a post blogging about the giveaway sometime before March 25, 2008 to be entered to win.

Here is a screenshot of the theme:

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.

In what is probably the most anticipated premium WordPress theme to date, it looks like the Mimbo Pro Theme has finally been released!

Darren created the free Mimbo Theme quite awhile ago and the demand was so high that he decided to follow it up with this work of art. Here are the features Darren lists for Mimbo Pro:

• 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

Sound good? The screenshots are even better! Here is the demo of the homepage:

And here is a sample of a single page:

So what about the price? This theme is very competitive, with the single-use license available at $89.95 and the multiple-use license is only $199.95.

Brian Gardner of Revolution is at it again, this time releasing a business version of his premium WordPress theme.  Because he has a different targeted audience for this theme, it comes with a few different and unique set of features targeted for small businesses.

Here is what Brian lists as features for this new 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

In looking over the theme, it looks to be the similar to the Revolution Pro Media theme, with the exception of the front page, which is designed for businesses.   Here is how the frontpage looks:

This theme stays true to Brian’s previous pricing structure, coming in at $79.95 for the single-use package and $199.95 for the multiple-use package.   I believe he also has two other versions in the works, so if you develop a lot of websites, you may also want to consider his All-in-One Inclusive package for only $399.95, which covers all future releases.

[Purchase a Revolution theme]

The premium WordPress themes market has been around now for well over 6 months now, and the number of people willing to buy their blog’s WordPress theme still continues to amaze me.  In addition to bloggers and small businesses wanting to give their sites a professional and unique look, I’ve also noticed that web developers have really embraced using these premium themes as templates to start with when creating a design for someone, saving them a lot of time creating the general layout and code of the theme. 

With the success of these premium WordPress themes, more and more theme designers are coming out of the woodwork and taking the time to create and release their own premium themes, because they feel that it is now worth their time due to the potential profit.  Why make a theme for a client for a one time fee when you can spend a little extra time and have a consistent flow of income over the coming months/years that far surpasses it?  This also gives theme authors a chance to generate large numbers of backlinks and increase traffic to their site.

So, how far will premium WordPress themes go? In a recent post at ThemeShaper, this question was asked of several of todays top theme designers. I will warn you that this is a very long post, but definitely worth the read if you have an interest in this sort of stuff.  Now, I know noone asked my opinion, but when have you known me to keep my opinions to myself?

My take seems to be closer to what Nathan Rice is saying in the post above.  With all of the new themes entering into the premium marketplace, we are beginning to see what I feel are a lot of average quality themes that are now being charged for.  These authors may counter the lower value by asking a lower price ($20.00-$49.99 per copy), but really many of them are just charging for a theme that in the past would have been free to the WordPress community.  I’ve even seen a previously few free themes that now have costs associated with them! 

Many of the leaders in the premium WordPress themes market charge more because they take it a step further than free themes, with most providing a control panel allowing you to enter your personal information directly from your dashboard and custom widgets. I’ve also found these themes to contain multiple versions of the homepage, the single post template, and/or the page templates.  This adds a tremendous value to the buyer because it allows them to separate themselves from others that have purchased the theme and avoid any manual coding.   I personally own copies of a few premium themes and can say without a doubt that their value can in many ways exceed the price associated with them.

So, what is the future of premium WordPress themes? To be honest, I feel there is a limited number of people that will be willing to purchase a WordPress theme for their site/blog. Many current buyers are small business owners and web developers.  As more bloggers and web developers switch to WordPress, premium WordPress themes will continue to sell, but probably not at the pace that they are right now.  All of the newcomers offering premium themes seem to have missed the rush. 

I’m also waiting for some more good premium templates designed specifically for blogs, which I think is a niche some of these designers could really capitalize on right now. Eventually, the market will become saturated causing many bloggers to frown upon using certain premium themes.  At this point, theme designers will have to look for new ways to generate income, so I think at this point (a year or two down the road) we will coin a new term, “elite WordPress themes.” These will be WordPress themes that raise the bar again and go even further than the premium ones.  Just like the internet and pretty much everything else, the industry will continue to evolve and grow, and the competition will continue to drive authors to release some incredible themes.   We’ve got CSS3 coming out soon, a new version of HTML, plus WordPress enhancements to look forward to, all of which may also influence the direction of these WordPress themes.

So, where do you think premium WordPress themes will be a year from now?