Giving Sites A Pro Look With Premium WordPress Themes
January 28th, 2010 // 2:38 pm @ admin
I’m looking at updating one or two of my WordPress themes, particularly the one on Voyagner, the problem these days is that there are so many top quality themes out there it is hard to choose. I remember when I first started using WordPress I would search for hours going through the thousands of free themes available for something I like and that had clean enough coding that I could figure out how to make any changes I needed. These days I can reasonably quickly cut it down to less than 10 premium themes but from there choosing is rather difficult.
Anyway what I wanted to do here was share what I think are some of the best themes and theme makers out there.
Top contenders for the new Voyagner theme are… WP-Genius, WP-MediaMag and Monograph
It is probably in that order too, Genius is slick, I’m liking it more and more and it has great potential. MediaMag has some cool features, I like how it can be used for video, but I’m not so sure about the overall look. Monograph is a cool look but I think it just has too much whitespace for me and will require too much work to get it to do what I want. I’d love to hear what you guys think of these themes, leave a comment with your thoughts.
These days I rarely even consider free themes, there are some great ones out there, premium quality even, if you don’t have the money for a paid theme you can still have a professional looking blog, it will just take a little more searching.
Templatic has an excellent range of themes, if you do any sort of marketing online or build WordPress sites for clients there are a bunch of themes there that are excellently designed with certain types of sites in mind. I have my eye on a few for sites that need an overhaul, this is the first place I check out when looking for premium themes, love ‘em. WPZoom and Solostream is where my shortlisted themes are from also have a bunch of other high quality themes that are definitely worth a look.
Off course I have to also mention the big boys at WooThemes; the current theme on Voyagner is one of theirs and they have some really great work, Gazette being one of my favourites but I was disappointed when I discovered hidden code in their themes. I’ll continue to use their themes if they suit my needs but they aren’t my first choice. I was inspired to use the current theme after seeing the beautifuly modified version on Income Diary, but now I’m looking for something that will suit the changes coming my blog’s way.
I stumbled across NewWPThemes.com which has very good collection of slick looking free themes that I think are perfect for giving niche sites like those I am currently building a much better look. They might not be quite as SEO friendly as far as coding goes but I think the visual improvement is worth it. Many of them are just rehashes of the same theme but I’m giving them a thumbs up. Also check out IsoTherm for a unique and very customisable free magazine theme, this was another one I considered, check out this review.
To get your hands on some premium themes on the cheap you can’t go past ElegantThemes, for $20 you get access to all the themes for a year including new releases. The eNews theme was an early candidate for the new Voyagner theme but just has more whitespace than I am looking for in this case.
The final option is a custom theme, it is becoming more appealing to me but I need to grow my site/s considerably to really make it worthwhile. The theme that gives the nearest functionality and is probably easiest to be modified into a completely custom theme is Thesis, you can even get themes for this theme, they seem to call them skins though, it’s a bit weird but there are some really good ones availible.
I think I’ve pretty much decided on WP-Genius but I will let it stew for a little while, it is a theme that is well suited to my future plans for Voyagner. If you are looking for a new theme or thinking of starting a blog then these sources are highly recommended so get searching
Category : Blog &Wordpress and Blogging
