Over the past year now, the premium WordPress themes market has really grown from nothing to what we see today, with a record number of authors are either offering premium themes, or selling premium versions of their existing popular free themes.   It truly is amazing to me that this wonderful software that we all love so much is able to help so many people to make money to feed their families while at the same time showing off their design skills.

This weekend I noticed something new and got me thinking a bit about where the premium WordPress themes market is headed.   As many people have said in the past, there are concerns that the premium themes we see today are becoming so common that people are missing out on that unique feel that many people buy these themes for.   I would of course argue that these themes were designed to be templates to be customized from rather than as an end-user product.   You could also argue that there are so many authors and designs now that buying a theme could still give you that unique look that people crave.

With that said, there appears to be a new solution.   We’ve seen theme clubs be talked about and eventually surface in a few places, but now it appears that Brian of Revolution has set another trend by offering his first of many exclusive themes:

What is an Exclusive Theme and How Does it Work?

In the screenshot above, Brian has released an incredible new theme, which is variation of his popular Revolution theme.   It is available only for a limited time and only a limited number to be sold (I believe in this case only 10 will be sold).    If you’d like a copy, you can get it for $499.95.

As far as my thoughts on Exclusive themes, I personally am unsure whether this business model will work.   It appears that 10 themes will be sold in total, so it isn’t truly a unique theme to your site, and the price range is getting close to the price that a company like a Unique Blog Designs or Blog Design Studio would charge for a 100% custom theme for your website. If you are going to spend that kind of money on a custom theme, wouldn’t it be better to spend a little extra to get a truly custom theme that you won’t find on 10 other sites?

With that said, I still haven’t made up my mind yet on this and would love to get your thoughts.  What do you think of this new business model?

Navigation menu is a really important part of a website, both visually and functionally. Though, I noticed that most blogs use a really simple navigation menu. A simple menu can be good sometimes, but if you’re looking for something more sophisticated, I’m pretty sure you’re going to enjoy this list.
Here’s 5 really cool tutorials to help you create a stunning navigation for your Wordpress blog.

Creating Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation in Wordpress

Which WordPress user doesn’t know Darren Hoyt, the creator the free magazine theme Mimbo Magazine ? In this great tutorial, Darren explains how to create a professional two-tiered navigation menu.
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How To: Making a Categories Drop-Down Menu

This was my first post on Hack Wordpress, and seems like you guys enjoyed it. In this tutorial, I explain how to create a navigation bar with a category drop-drown menu.
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Adding a navigation bar to the default kubrick theme

The default “Kubrick” theme is probably the most used Wordpress theme. Though, I think it should be better with a navigation bar. Hopefullt, this tutorial is here to help!
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Wordpress: “Magazine style” Horizontal dropdown menu

One of my last tutorials, published on my blog CatsWhoCode. This how-to explain how you can create an horizontal dropdown menu.

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Using Sliding Doors with Wordpress Navigation

This sliding doors CSS hack allows you to create sophisticated tabs for your navigation bar. Sadly, Wordpress core functions wp_list_pages() and wp_list_categories() don’t allow you to add the required span tag to use this technique.
This tutorial will show you how to bypass this limitation by using a hack, and then you’ll be ready to enjoy sliding-doors for your Wordpress navigation!

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Any other navigation tutorial that should be in the list? Leave us a comment below!

Here are a few links to some recent WordPress-related posts I thought you may enjoy:

• Using Actions in WordPress Themes – Joost De Valk explains how he used actions to build his current WordPress theme.
• Free WordPress Theme: Purity – Maigret over at Cats Who Code has posted a new free WordPress theme.
• How to Add Google Reader Subscriptions to a WordPress Page – Emil explains how he managed to import his Google Reader subscriptions and build this list into their own WordPress page.
• 10 New Useful WordPress Plugins – Blog oh Blog has published a list of their favorite new WordPress plugins.   In fact, they are so new that I hadn’t heard of a single one!
• How to Build Breadcrumbs Into Your Blog – Jean-Baptiste Jung explains how to build breadcrumbs into your WordPress blog without the need of a WordPress plugin.
• 30 Free Quality WordPress Themes – Smashing Magazine has posted another great WordPress themes post, this time featuring their favorite 30 quality WordPress themes.   These are definitely some of the best artistic themes I have seen available for free and plan to add a few of them to our WordPress themes page.

Chances are you’ve probably noticed a number of Feedburner feed count chicklets scattered all over the blogosphere proudly displaying blog feed counts.   I’m sure many people look at this as a way to inflate their blogging ego, but I’ve always looked at this as a way to show visitors at a quick glance that your blog is liked.  Recently the popular Aweber newsletter service released a similar widget to display the number of newsletter subscribers you have, and now it looks like the chicklet has gone mainstream.

With this same idea in mind, it looks like Planet Ozh has released the Liz Strauss comment counter WordPress plugin.    This WordPress plugin was designed to display your blogs comment count proudly.    I think this plugin is a great way to show that your blog has a lot of conversations.

Ozh lists the following features:

• Performance: the plugin generates a static image every time a comment is left (or an admin moderates one). The benefit is that, when showing the badge, nothing dynamic is generated on the fly by the webserver.
• Failover: if for some reason your server was not able to generate a static image (write permissions or whatever) the plugin falls back to generating the badge on the fly, so you always have something to show.
• Minimal overhead: state of the art code that loads only when needed, and the plugin adds a grand total of zero extra database query.
• Compatibility: the admin interface either runs as a widget (with no extra “Settings” page created) or as a traditional plugin.
• Flexibility: just like your Feedburner badge, except there’s more options!
• Neat interface: one click color presets, killer Farbtastic color picker, and cute FamFamFam icons
• Ready for translation: polyglots, a .pot file is included. If you happen to translate the plugin, be sure to send me your work so I can include it in the archive! (Please send your .mo and .po files to ozh at planetozh dot com)
• Fun: well yes, it’s just fun to show how many comments you have

So basically it is widget ready and you can pick a color to match your blog.   You can download the plugin here.   Enjoy!

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the release of One Theme, which at the time was one of the best premium WordPress themes I had ever seen.   In the time since then, it looks like Lee wasn’t satisfied because he has since released One Theme 1.1, which has some major improvements.

New One Theme Features:

• Four Featured Categories
• More Tag Management
• Sidebar Image Styles
• Remove Content Limit
• Social Bookmarks
• Contact Page Template
• Exclude Author Information
• SEO Friendly Search Result URL’s
• 125×125 Banners
• Related Articles Feature
• Affiliate Link Ready
• Title Limit Option
• Embed Code for Featured Video
• No Sidebars Page Template

Here are screenshots of a couple of the new layouts you have to choose from.

One Theme News Homepage

One Theme Blog Homepage

And here is my favorite new feature:

Readers can click the tabs to see bookmark options and tags.

If you are interested in this theme, despite all of the improvements, it looks like One Theme is still listed at the same prices!   You still have the following choices: Webmaster ($99.00), Webmaster Pro ($199.00), or the Web Developer License ($299.00).