Exploring Premium Theme Options

Thousands of free WordPress themes are available, but you might also want to consider premium (for purchase) themes for your site. The cliché “you get what you pay for” is something often quoted when referring to free services or products, including WordPress and free themes.

Typically, when you download and use something free, there's no recourse for assistance with the product or service. Requests for help generally go unanswered. Therefore, your expectations should be lower because you aren't paying anything. When you pay for something, you usually assume that you have support or service for your purchase and the product is high (or acceptable) quality.

For instance, WordPress is available free. However, despite an active support forum, there's no guarantee or promise of getting support while using the software. Moreover, you have no right to demand service.

Here are some things to consider when contemplating a premium theme. Additionally, we selected the commercial companies listed later in this chapter based on these criteria:

• Selection: Many theme developers offer a rich and diverse theme selection, including themes designed for specific niche industries, topics, or uses (such as video, blogging, real estate, or magazine themes, for example). Generally, you can find a good solid theme to use for your site from one source.
• Innovation: To differentiate them from their free counterparts, premium themes include innovative features, such as theme settings or advanced options that extend WordPress to help you do more.
• Great design with solid code: Although many beautiful free themes are available, premium themes are professionally coded, beautifully designed, cost thousands of dollars, and require dozens of hours to build, which simply isn't feasible for many free theme developers.
• Support: Most commercial companies have full-time support staff to answer questions, troubleshoot issues, and point you to resources beyond their support. Often, premium theme developers spend more time helping customers troubleshoot issues outside the theme products. Therefore, purchasing a premium theme often provides a dedicated support community to question about advanced issues and upcoming WordPress features; otherwise, you're on your own.
• Stability: No doubt, you've purchased a product or service from a company only to find later that they've gone out of business. If you choose to use a premium theme, we highly encourage you to purchase a theme from an established company with a solid business model, a record of accomplishment, and a dedicated team devoted to building and supporting quality products.

• E-mail the designer who is selling the premium theme and ask about a support policy.
• Find people who've purchased the theme and contact them to find out their experiences with the theme and the designer.
• Carefully read any terms that the designer has published on his site to find any restrictions that exist with licensing.
• If the premium theme designer has a support forum, ask whether you can browse through the forum to find out how actively the designer answers questions and provides support. Are users waiting weeks to get their questions answered? Or does the designer seem to be on top of support requests?
• Search Google for the theme and the designer. Often, users of premium themes post about their experiences with the theme and the designer. You can find a lot of positive and, potentially, negative information about the theme and the designer before you buy.

These developers are doing some amazingly innovative things with WordPress themes, and we highly recommend you explore their offerings:

• iThemes (http://ithemes.com): Shown in Figure 2-7, iThemes emphasizes business WordPress themes that use WordPress as a full-fledged and powerful content management system. Their pride and joy is iThemes Builder, which is more a build-a-WordPress Web site tool than a typical theme.
• StudioPress (http://studiopress.com): Shown in Figure 2-8, StudioPress has a great team, paid support moderators, and a big selection of WordPress themes. Their highlight project is Genesis Theme Framework, which provides six layout options, search engine optimization, and automatic theme updates.

  Figure 2-7: iThemes.com, provider of premium WordPress themes.

  

  Figure 2-8: StudioPress offers premium themes and a support forum.

  

• WooThemes (http://woothemes.com): Shown in Figure 2-9, WooThemes has a wide selection of high-quality themes with excellent theme options and support. Their highlight theme is Canvas, a highly customizable theme that has more than 100 options to personalize your site via a theme options panel.

  Figure 2-9: WooThemes has premium themes, community, and support.

  

• Press75 (http://press75.com): Shown in Figure 2-10, Press75 offers a number of niche themes for photography, portfolios, and video. Check out the Social Life and Video Elements themes for great examples.
• Headway Themes (http://headwaythemes.com): Shown in Figure 2-11, Headway's signature theme is Headway, which offers drag-and-drop layout editing and advanced, easy-to-use styling options.

Figure 2-10: Press75 offers premium themes, demos, and theme packages.

Figure 2-11: Headway Themes has some unique layouts.