As the premium themes market continues to grow and expand, it is interesting to see theme designers move to fill niches that were not previously filled.

The latest example of this is the eGamer theme by my friend Nick Roach over at Elegant Themes.  Whether you play video games or MMORPG’s (such as World of Warcraft, EverQuest 2, etc.), the eGamer theme was created with gamers in mind, and the feature set matches what video game bloggers would most likely be looking for.

Features included with the eGamer theme include:

• Custom Author Review System.
• Video Embedding (from video sites such as YouTube).
• Thumbnail Resizing.
• Ability to Display Recent Reviews, Banner Ads, Popular Posts, and Recent Videos section.
• Choice of Magazine or Blog-style Layout.
• Option for post-page thumbnails

You can read more about the features included with eGamer here.

Here is how the eGamer WordPress theme looks by default:

Here is what the eGamer post page looks like:

In order to get a true appreciation of eGamer’s appearance and feature set, you’ll want to view the full demo here.   I love how the sidebar is on the left and the comment section is really well done.

For a theme of this quality, there has to be a price, right?  Well sort of.   In order to download the eGamer WordPress theme, you simply need to be a member of the Elegant Themes club, which only costs $19.99 for a years membership!

With that $19.99 you also get access to every other theme released by Elegant Themes during that year.  After a year passes, you have the option of renewing your membership to continue to receive future themes.   I’ve been following Nick for quite awhile now and he seems to maintain a pretty nice release schedule, making this investment a no-brainer!

Some of our long time readers may remember last April I wrote about a somewhat revolutionary new WordPress theme, which in my opinion was well ahead of its time, known as the Shifter theme.  Though this theme looked a little plain at first, it was completely built around using the WordPress widget feature, allowing for incredible versatility.

Since that time no one else has really attacked the widget angle the way Shifter did…..at least until now.   After over 2 months of production and quite a few beta testers (myself included), I am excited to share with our readers that iThemes has released what is probably their best theme yet, the Flexx Theme.

This theme comes with over 1,000 possible layout combinations!   Other Flexx features include:

• Rotating Header Images – Easily upload your new header images and set the Flash-like transition effects
• Contact Form Page Template – The custom image uploader feature allows you to personalize your site with your own logo
• Plug and Play Graphic Changes – Easily change the look of your site by uploading new background images (setting every different combo with it) and setting the color through a Photoshop-like color picker.
• Menu Builder – Pick and choose what Pages you want in the menu navigation, including subpages.
• Search Engine Optimization – As with all our themes, we’ve built it to get you the best exposure in the search engines, and include a SEO panel to tweak some basic settings.
• Multiple Color Styles - This first series comes in two pre-built color styles (Bold and Canvas), but it has a rockin’ feature that lets you easily upload new background images (setting every different combo with it) and setting the color through a Photoshop-like color picker.
• Drop down navigation menu

To get an idea of one of the 1,000+ possibilities available, you can check out the Flexx demo.   Here are a couple screen shots:

Flexx Homepage

Flexx Post Page

The best part about the new Flexx theme is the price!  It falls under the iThemes standard pricing model of $79.95 for a single-use license and $249.95 for the developer’s license.  iThemes 2008 theme club members of course get this theme for free.

What do you think of this incredible theme?   Anyone else think that widget-based themes might be the future or the premium WordPress themes market?

Have you ever noticed how many high profile bloggers like to offer a monthly review post at the end of each month featuring their top posts for that month?   This is a common tactic used by bloggers to recycle some old posts and promote some of their best work.

If you’d like to do something like this, or already are, you might want to check out a new WordPress plugin called WP Best Posts Summary.   The plugin will automatically generate a summary post daily, weekly, or monthly (you control this from the Options panel) and allow you to set how many posts to use.  Here is an example of how it will look:

You can download or get more information about the plugin here.

Somehow I missed this yesterday, so I’m making up for it now with this post.  It looks like WordPress released their monthly wrap-up for October yesterday, complete with an announcement of their first billion-impression month!   That is a hard number to wrap your head around if you really think about it, making it a great accomplishment.

Here are the October statistics for WordPress.com by Matt:

• 323,786 blogs were created.
• 343,832 new users joined.
• 4,085,148 file uploads.
• 1995.86 gigabytes of new files.
• 531 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 8,862,195 comments.
• 1,309,045 logins.
• 1,088,583,200 page views on WordPress.com, and another 738,282,634 on self-hosted blogs (1,826,865,834 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 1,418,933 active blogs and 16,599,550 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,179,018,712 words.

Bonus statistic:

• 53,290 PollDaddy polls added this month — a 1250% increase from September!

It is good to see WordPress.com continue to grow and expand at such a rapid rate.

Last month when we switched from HackWordPress.com to WPHacks.com, I mentioned that one part of the move was due to the trademark violation in the old domain name (WordPress is a trademarked term).

Looking back, I really wish I would have known about the trademark prior to launching the blog.   Moving your blog to a new domain name can be a huge hassle (I explained what was involved here) and your blog will usually take a huge hit in the search engine rankings (either temporarily or permanently).   This is because most of those backlinks accrued over the past year are pointing towards the old domain name, etc.

Being someone who manages quite a large sized domain portfolio (300+ domains), I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year or so learning how to do a trademark search when researching what domains to invest my money in and which domains I want to develop into web properties.   There seems to be a good amount of interest from others wanting to know how to do this, so hopefully this post will fill that need.

Why Should I Worry About Trademark Violations?

Before I explain how to do a trademark search, I wanted to quickly discuss why avoiding trademark violations is so important.   A trademark is filed by a company to protect their brand.

How many of you call tissues “Kleenex”?  Kleenex describes one brand of tissues, but because they did not protect their trademark, the term Kleenex has instead become a generic term for tissues.  This of course caused them to lose any control they might have had over how their name is used.

Like any good company would, Automattic wants to protect the term “WordPress” from becoming a generic term.   This is why they do not allow others to use the term “WordPress” in their domain name.   This can lead to confusion with readers who believe that the domain is an official WordPress site or affiliated in some way with WordPress, which could eventually lead to problems for WordPress users (if the content is bad, incorrect, or the site is malicious in some way).

Because of this, most trademark holders will go a long way to protect their brand, including filing lawsuits.   Lawsuits, or threatening lawsuits, has become very common with people registering names like FacebookApplications.com, DiggThis.com, etc.    In order to avoid complications, avoid being forced to pull down a website/blog, or having to move your site to a new domain, you’ll want to first make sure that your potential domain/website is free of any trademarks.

Note:  If you register a domain prior to a trademark being filed by a company, that company usually won’t have rights to take the domain from you UNLESS you are displaying ads on the site or somehow making money off their brand.  Keep this in mind if you own a domain and an upstart grows popular fast.

How To Do a Trademark Search

Okay, so now you know why doing a trademark search is so important.   Here are the 5 steps you need to follow to do a trademark search:

1. Visit the US government’s sitesearch page.
2. Click Search at the top of the right sidebar menu.
3. Click New User Form Search (Basic).
4. In the Search Term field, you’ll want to enter the keyword you want to check on the trademark of.
5. Click Submit Query.

When doing your search, you’ll want to make sure to search for your term with and without spaces. An example would be if you were looking for Burger King, you would try both “burgerking” and “burger king”.

If you follow the above steps and search for the term “wordpress” you’ll see that it is indeed trademarked, but you can use this method to search for just any keyword you want to.   I recommend doing this prior to ever launching a website of any kind, just to make sure.   I also used this process after picking my business name to ensure that I wouldn’t run the risk of losing my business identity at some point down the road.

Are you always doing a trademark search prior to launching a new website or blog?