Theme Reviewer is a place where Premium Wordpress Themes get reviewed. Theme designers publish their work for sale – it is my job to make sure that what you pay is worth it. I buy most of the themes, download and test them. My aim is to provide an honest, in depth review of the latest and greatest Premium Themes for Wordpress.
Wordpress power some of the world’s most beautiful and popular websites. Websites such as People.com, The Yahoo Blog and The New York Times Blog all use the Wordpress engine. It is open source software that is built on the PHP programming language with MySQL database back end. From the Wordpress Codex:
WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL.
Designers especially like Wordpress due to its simplicity as well as you can control almost all aspects of a page. Bloggers love Wordpress due to its ease of use. Creating posts, categories, pages, tags is as easy as typing an email. Businesses adore Wordpress due to its friendliness with search engines, and its marketability. No matter what your website’s purpose: blog, advertisement, web presence, e-commerce, photos, videos – Wordpress can handle it.
To find out more about Wordpress, browse through these excellent resources.
Note that there are two flavors of Wordpress: 1) Wordpress.com and 2) Wordpress.org:
- Wordpress.com lets you have your own blog in the Wordpress.com website. This means you can have your own blog website up and running in the Wordpress.com domain
- Wordpress.org on the other hand – is self hosted Wordpress. This means you have the Wordpress engine downloaded in your own hosting environment, with the domain of your choice. Hosting Wordpress requires a good hosting company. Here’s a list of good web hosts.
If Wordpress is the engine – Themes are the shell of your website. The skin, the template or the presentation layer of your blog. Wordpress may be excellent in powering the “behind the scenes” functions of your website, but it is also important to have good design.
Wordpress Theme technology allows for pure separation of your websites content and design. This means that search engines – can easily crawl through your posts, comments and messages and index them for greater search results.
Design your own theme?
Note that if you have a keen eye for good design – creating themes for Wordpress is not that hard. All you need is basic knowledge of HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. Designing your own theme gives you full control of how your pages will look as well as ensures that no other blog has the same look as yours.
If you’re the type that doesn’t want to mess with code – Premium Themes is the way to go. This is the main reason why “Premium Themes” are – Premium. Premium Themes give you more control on how your blog will look from a few simple clicks in the administration panel. Let me explain:
There are thousands of Wordpress Themes available for free. These themes usually do not allow control internally. What I mean is when you download a free theme – you’re stuck on how it looks. To change even the simplest things (i.e. background color, font sizes, number of columns) you would have to change the code. This means that you would have to have a local installation of Wordpress, an HTML editor software, a bucketful of patience combined with a heap of diligence to test and view the things you want changed. Without knowledge of HTML and CSS – this process can take time; plenty of time.
This is where premium themes come in. The designers took the extra step of not only making the theme look good – but also allow you (the web administrator) to change visual elements from inside the Wordpress admin panel.
Now with this ability – you, the blog owner, can focus more on posting and creating content. This is what separates a regular theme to a premium theme. This also constitutes why premium themes are usually not free (at times can be quite expensive). Its because they’re a lot harder to make; as well as it gives you the ability to control how your website looks from a few simple clicks.
Sidenote: Web designers with multiple clients also use premium themes to speed up their design process. Gone are the days where designers mock up a site and wait for approval from their clients. With premium themes – they just activate the theme and take note of what needs to be changed. Premium themes are often well documented and come with excellent support from the developers. So web designers only have to tweak small changes to the theme and voila – website done.
Now its up to you to weigh the benefits of premium themes and the price you pay to get them. Typically designers price their themes on an individual use basis, or a developers package of some sort. There are also a handful of designers that offer a membership price for their “themes” club – where you can access all of their themes for recurring fee.
That is why I created this website. Besides my reviews, you can throw in your two cents by joining the discussion. Comments are open on all posts, as well as a star-rating system that allows you to rate my reviews. So read on, hope you find my content useful on your next web project. Happy Blogging!
