I bit the bullet recently and paid to join a site with some premium themes. The site is Elegant Themes, and for $20 a year you get access to a lot of nice looking themes. They have their own options and most have multiple layout and color options. The themes are very nice looking and well put together, the designer/developer did a great job here, and at $20 for a year, access to all the themes you can want to choose from, and potentially more themes, it’s a great deal.
The themes that seem to be more up to date are the eBusiness, ePhoto, eVid, eGamer, and Coldstone themes. They are the nicest looking, in my opinion. The other themes look just as nice, but I haven’t worked with most of them, and a couple I tried look like they are waiting to be updated to 2.8, or my local test environment is broken, could be either really.
The themes all have a read me on how to install them, and any required plugins, and Photoshop files to work with if you choose to customize anything. The site also has a large forum for everything from questions, to suggestions, and a place to show off any customizations to the themes.
Once you get the theme installed you’ll want to go and take a look at the options for the theme. Currently they are working on making their options piece for the themes easier to use, and nicer looking.
Here you can see the options for the eBusiness theme, they look nice, and are pretty straightforward in what they do.
Most of the theme is controlled through the options, some of what you can put on your homepage, or use for thumbnails is done through the use of custom fields, a common thread amongst themes like these, and the rest is setting the links and some teaser type text. The on thing I can say here is the use of IDs for things on the homepage, specifically with eBusiness theme, and a couple others. I don’t use the querystring param setup for my permalinks, it hurts SEO (yes even on a tiny site I think about SEO). I use permalinks formatted with the month/day/year/title, or something along those lines. I don’t like having to dig to find the ID of something to have it on the homepage. I guess either Wordpress could make these IDs more readily available, which may already be possible but I am not seeing it. It would be better if the theme could pick the ID, or maybe have something to browse the content you already have in the site, and it can pull the ID itself.
Once those items are setup, the last thing left to do really is replace the stock logo with your own. This was one other point I was kind of disappointed in. Throughout the theme you can set the URL for an image for the “About Me” section, or for many other items like ads. However with the logo, the only thing I can find is to change the name of the file in the header file, or to name your custom logo the same as the stock one. It would have been nice to have an option for this in the theme. Again, this is a tiny thing, and anyone who knows Wordpress should be able to manage this on their own.
All in all, these themes are fantastic, you get a lot for a tiny price tag really. I highly suggest taking a look at the site, see if there is something you like for your own site, and take the plunge. The forums are active with the admins, so help is always easily found, and they are beautiful themes, with the most important part, the right price.
I had spent a lot of time looking at other “premium” themes, and theme clubs. What I found was a lot of generic layouts, or worse the same layout repeated with slightly different colors or fonts. Most of these themes alone, cost more than the price of the many options you get with Elegant Themes. Hop on over and take a look, and check my other site where I’ll be using on of their themes soon. Now I just have to make up my mind.
