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.

With many of the top theme designers switching their focus to creating and selling premium WordPress themes, it is always good to see some premium quality WordPress themes being released for free.

Today’s theme is called WP Freemium, and it was originally created by Ptah Dunbar for BloggingTips.com. It looks like due to some complications, BloggingTips.com decided to go another route so Ptah has made this theme available for anyone for free.

Here are the advertised features:

• Valid xHTML Strict 1.0 / CSS
• Code is well commented for the non technical savvy
• Sidebar Widgets enabled
• Custom Front Page with 3 featuring articles
• By default - 6 advertisement spots on all pages
• Gravatars highly Supported for Comments, Author Profiles and Author Posts.
• Author Byline + Promotion on single pages
• Author Profiles feature prominent image of the author with bio, contact details and more
• Image Gallery Support
• Print Stylesheet is included.
• Favicon + iPhone Webclip icon Ready
• SEO Optimized title tags and headers
• 404 Error Page notifies admin each time someone stumbles across a broken link so they can fix it.

I was unable to find a demo, so here are some screenshots provided by the author:

Homepage

Single Page

Author Bio

Author Page

I really like how this theme was setup for a blog that has multiple authors, making it a great free option for anyone starting a multi-author WordPress blog.

If you’d like to get a copy for your WordPress blog, click over to get WP Freemium.

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...]

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!

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...]