Our gallery not only consists of uniquely designed, original themes that designers work hard at building from the ground up, but also free and premium themes that come with a solid layout that can be modified to the designers liking. This saves a lot of time as well as allows less experienced designers to make their splash in the WordPress world. Although not as “pure” of a design, they still can account for some beautiful designs that deserve recognition. WP Zoom recently had a few examples of how a few free and premium themes have been modified uniquely.
The providers of these free and premium themes deserve a lot of recognition for their hard work and time put into making solid platforms for everyone from a daily blogger to an elite designer. These designers are providing some of the backbone to making WordPress the premium CMS platform on the web today. A trend we’ve noticed lately has been an increase in theme clubs. In fact, two of our recent sponsors, WebRefill and WooThemes, are offering themes club opportunities. A themes club allows a person to pay a subscription which gives them access to multiple premium themes and possibly more themes in the future. Rather than pay for one premium WordPress theme at a time, the themes club allows customers to pick and choose from a variety of themes at a discounted price. Other designers, rather than start a club, many times offer their theme portfolio as a package deal. This also can be of value to someone who doesn’t like the commitment of a subscription and would rather not pay for each theme individually.
As fellow WordPress lovers, we loved the idea of a themes club when it first started but were skeptical at times, especially when WP Designer did a quick promotion of his club and then sold the site to somebody who drove the idea into the ground. One themes club that we mentioned earlier, Woo Themes isn’t taking the individual designer approach. The club is a team of 4 designers, Elliot Jay Stocks, Adii, Magnus Jepson, and Mark Forrester, who have had many of their modified premium themes or works featured on our site. We all at some point in our life experiences deal with an individual who has a hard time making deadlines or contracts which puts less confidence in their services. Yet we like the individual service and experience and take that risk for it. Well, to finally hear a themes club that is combining the confidence of 4 different designers with established names on the line along with the personal service aspect that we all love is refreshing. With their combination of experience and portfolio, their themes club, WooThemes, just might prove that strength does come in numbers.
We feel theme clubs are a great idea and would love to see all of them succeed. This just makes the WordPress community even stronger as designers and bloggers are able to select from even more high quality themes at a lower price to use or learn from. It also motivates those that run the clubs to put more effort in providing quality premium themes out there to satisfy their subscribers. It’s a win win situation. The beauty of design is that it’s constantly changing and finding new ways to express a personality, corporate look, or just something unique in a website presentation. We really do love how WordPress allows for the simplest blogger to the most experienced designer to take a part in something like this.
One Response to “The Beauty of Themes”
Adii
Thanks for the mention and kind words guys! 🙂 This is definitely only the start for us and we will most definitely keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible within the WordPress community.