After speaking with my good friend Adii of Premium News Themes, it looks like he has made a bold, yet wise decision to move his Premium News business to the new domain Woo Themes.  Obviously moving your website to a new domain can be a big hassle (I’ve done it 4 times in the past year for a few of my websites and it was a lot of work), but in this situation I really think it was the right and necessary move for the growth of his business.

So, why did Adii move his online business to a new home?  One very important word…brandability.  When he launched Premium News themes, it was originally to sell one theme, the original Premium News theme.  Since then, his business has expanded drastically, and that domain was limiting him to releasing only news WordPress themes.

So, now the Premium News Themes can be found over at Woo Themes.   What other changes were included with the domain transfer?

1. Woo Themes Team Grows - The Woo Themes team has added a new member named Elliot Jay Stocks.   I’m not familiar with Elliot’s work, but more people probably means faster theme production and more choices.
2. Woo Themes Club - This is an interesting idea for a subscription-based WordPress themes club that appears to be set to replace the concept of an All-Inclusive Package we’ve seen other designers do.  The cheapest membership is $150.00 quarterly, but that gives you access to all existing Woo Themes as well as any new themes.
3. Regular Theme Releases - The Woo Themes team is committed to releasing at least 1 new premium theme each month, with many months have 2 new premium themes.
4. Two New Premium Themes - You can now purchase two new premium WordPress themes.  They are VibrantCMS and ProudFolio.
5. New Prices - All Woo Themes (previously Premium News themes) are now available at premanently reduced prices.  You can get a single license for $70.00 or a developer’s license for $150.00.

Overall, I am impressed with the new setup and I think it will be interesting to see how this changes the premium WordPress themes market.  How will having a team instead of an individual improve both production and support?  Will their price reduction force the competition to reduce their prices?  Will their twist on the theme club idea take off?

Check out the new and improved Woo Themes.

When the premium WordPress themes market began to form towards the end of 2007, the entire idea was to provide a customized theme for an affordable price. The targeted audience was to fill the needs of serious bloggers and small businesses.

You may have also noticed that most premium WordPress themes offer a developers license (or multi-use license). This is because these themes were designed with developers in mind. Developers get the basic skeleton of a developed theme making it easy for them to hack the code and stylesheet to give their clients a custom look.

Yesterday I found a nice post over at WPZoom designed to showcase some premium WordPress themes that have been hacked to provide a custom look for the website. In fact, most you won’t recognize when lined up with the original premium theme template!

I think this post did a great job of not just showing some great designs, but also supporting the whole concept of the original intention of the premium themes market.

Hack WordPress was one of only 3-4 “WordPress” niche blogs that existed prior to the creation of the Premium WordPress themes market. As I sit back and reflect on the early days of the premium WordPress themes market, when Solostream’s themes were first being converted to premium, and Revolution was being launched, each existing WordPress blog was faced with a choice. Do we promote these themes? After all, WordPress was founded on open source, and each of us (WordPress founders, plugin/theme authors, and WordPress bloggers) were contributing our time and energy to improving the WordPress community without any compensation. Should these people be paid for what we do for free?

Some blogs ending up promoting them, while other blogs did not. I personally ended up making the decision that I would promote premium themes on this blog because I felt that they would help improve WordPress, and to this day I really think that they really have. Many of these authors are making so much money that they are able to make (and support) their themes as a full time job, which I think is pretty sweet. It also comes with a lot of responsibility, and the money allows these authors to truly focus, innovate, and make their themes more advanced, which advances WordPress as a whole. The bar gets set and all new themes are measured against them. It forces continued functionality and innovation. I truly believe that if the ability to monetize these themes didn’t exist for most of these authors, the quality of themes out there would be much lower because it wouldn’t be worth their time to try to raise the bar. Would we even have CMS themes for WordPress yet?

We also need to remember that this isn’t really any different than doing custom WordPress themes for people (such as Unique Blog Designs).  Premium WordPress themes have made it so people can afford a custom quality theme (in most cases) from an affordable price for a blogger or small business.  People with high income blogs can still afford to get there theme custom made.

One point I would also like to make is that I do think that people with WordPress blogs have an obligation to only promote products they do use or would use if the need for it presented itself. I’ve always made sure to be selective and only promote themes or plugins that I felt were truly of premium quality. I also try to only promote ones that are well supported by their authors. I can think of at least 20 that I’ve chosen not to promote here because of a number of reasons (invalid code, I felt wasn’t premium quality, etc.).

Anyway, regardless of my opinion of them, over the last 8 months premium WordPress themes have really found a home in the WordPress community, and I’ve even noticed that blogs have been created strictly for the purpose of promoting these themes. From the people I’ve talked to, the opinions of this market are mixed.

One person firmly against the premium themes market as a whole is Justin Tadlock, who recently wrote a post titled Screw the WordPress Themes Market. Justin is someone that I’ve been following for quite awhile now and have a huge respect for his opinions on all things WordPress. He releases a lot of great free WordPress themes, free WordPress plugins, and also blogs regularly about WordPress. Here is an excerpt from his post:

WordPress was built from a community of people willing to share freely. Yes, even themes. What? Yes, themes were free at one point. Good Great themes were free at one point.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here — stop releasing pay-for-use themes.

Sure, there’s a market there, but I don’t want to see every single mediocre theme have a price tag attached to it. Just because it’s a magazine-type theme doesn’t mean it’s a premium theme, or that it’s worth some form of funds anyway.

If you’re going to release a theme and call it premium, then you need to — in the words of a high school cheerleader — “bring it.”

I don’t have a problem with people releasing themes for money. It’s something I’ve considered on several occasions. What I do have a problem with is users getting screwed out of $100, $50, or even $30 because they bought a theme that’s mediocre at best, a theme that has invalid code, or don’t get the support they need for using the theme.

Reading Justin’s post actually reminded me of what I was saying when I wrote the post Premium WordPress Theme Responsibilities a couple months ago. To many people are releasing average themes and charging for them.

It seems everyone has an opinion about premium themes, and I’d love to hear yours. What is your opinion of premium WordPress themes?

Although the premium WordPress theme market has only been around for a little over 6 months now, there have already been several trends that have shown up. Each time a new premium theme author steps forward, they innovate and push the other authors to keep up and continue to improve their existing themes. This is why many of the top authors are regularly updating their existing themes to keep up with the competition.

In the end, the consumers are the ones that win, because they are getting better themes and a larger variety of themes to choose from when they go to make a purchase. So, what is the next trend we can expect with premium WordPress themes?

One thing I would like to see, though it is actually very basic, is that each theme including a print stylesheet. This of course is a separate stylesheet that is used when someone goes to print a website page. For example, one of the sites I run publishes a lot of recipes (1-2 per day). I needed a good print stylesheet so our readers can print our pages and have them display the recipe correctly on the page.

I’ll admit I’ve seen a couple premium themes that offer this, but a majority still do not. I personally believe the more you can do to make your theme appeal to more people, the more success a premium theme author will find. I believe a paying customer should expect things like multiple stylesheets available, multiple page and post layouts, an options panel. The more flexible it is, the better.

Hopefully we’ll start to see more and more of the print stylesheet showing up in the coming months. In the meantime, what trends would you like to see with the next generation premium WordPress themes?

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

[Continue Reading...]

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

[Continue Reading...]