The premium Wordpress themes market has continued to grow and evolve over the past two years, so much so that we’ve started seeing a few complaints that all of the premium themes seem to generally look the same.  It seems a few designers are setting the trends while the rest of the designers just follow and release similar themes, causing many of them to just look like variations of the others.

One of the theme designers that recently caught my eye is a team of WordPress theme developers who launched a new website called WordPress Now.  Since the website has launched, they’ve already got three themes released, and the have two more which are in their final development stages.

Here are the three designs that WordPress Now currently has for sale:

Bloom Theme

Triumph Theme

Elements Theme

To see the true flexibility of these themes, you can view the live demos of each theme here.

As an added bonus, I spoke to the developers at WP Now and was able to land a couple sneak previews of upcoming premium themes that haven’t been released yet.

Vintmint Blog Theme (Not Yet Released)

Simplista Lifestream Theme (Not Yet Released)

So, what all is included with the purchase of a WordPress Now theme?  Your purchase includes a number of features (features differ with each individual theme), a large FAQ for answering questions, tutorials for getting started, and of course theme support!

WordPress Now also offers some impressive price options, offering their themes for as low as $49.00 to start, as well as offering a few WordPress developer options for designers.   Their two unreleased themes (shown above) will be available at even lower prices ($29.00 and $39.00 respectively).

If you’d like to learn more about Wordpress Now, you can read more about the features and support information here.

As much of the WordPress themes market continues to move towards the premium (paid) model, it can sometimes be a chore for the consumer trying to find the best value for your dollar.   There are certainly a few overpriced themes out there, but with a little effort you can also find a few premium themes you can find which are often undervalued.

When it comes to value, I usually recommend people start by looking at the various theme clubs available.   Of the theme clubs out there, there is no doubt the best overall value is with the Elegant Themes club.  To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, lets take a look at their latest release, the new eBusiness theme:

eBusiness WordPress Theme

You can view the live demo of the eBusiness theme here.

The eBusiness theme also includes a very impressive control panel, of which the author lists the following features:

Design Layout – The layout tab houses some of the major overlying options that effect the structure and appearance of your website.

• Color Schemes – eBusiness comes with three skins, and each skin comes in three colors. You can switch between these 9 different variations at any time from the drop-down menu.
• Website Structure – The essence of eBusiness is to act as a CMS, creating a page-based layout. I have, however, included the option to bypass the page-based homepage in favor of a normal blog layout. You can switch between Page Structure and Blog Structure at any time.
• Footer Options – You will notice that each page has a widgetized footer on the bottom.

Homepage Options – The homepage tab allows you to manage your homepage. If you are using blog style then most of these options do not apply, but if you are using the Page-based system then you will have to use this area to set up your homepage.

1. Slider Control – You will notice that the demo features 3 sliding elements on the top of the homepage. These are managed via the Homepage tab. Here you can customize the content text, the title of the tab, the text used in the button, the thumbnail image (which is automatically re-sized) and an optional read more link, which can be pointed anywhere. You can also choose how many sliding elements to display (up to 3).
2. Pages Control - The content on the homepage is made up of WordPress pages. You will create a page in wp-admin and then define the page to be used in the Homepage options tab. Simply input the page id of the pages you want to use and they will appear. You can also choose how many pages you want to use (up to4).
3. Blog Scroller – Even if you are using the page-based system you can still have a blog area on your site. For this reason I have included a blogroll on the homepage with a link to your most recent posts. This can be turned off if you don’t plan to have a blog section. You can choose how many recent posts to display. You can also customize the RSS link if you want to point it towards your feedburner account.

Blog Setup – If you are using the Blog Structure, or if you plan to include a blog within your Page-based website, you can customize your blog here.

1. Post Format - You can choose between “Blog Style” mode or “Default” mode. The Blog Style mode displays your posts in full on index pages, while Default mode automatically truncates the post to create a short preview with a “read more” link.
2. Categories Bar – The categories bar, with links to your various blog categories, only appears on blog pages. However, if you are using the blog as simply a recent news section, and don’t plan to have several categories, you can turn off this categories bar.
3. Further Post Preview Control – In addition to editing the length of the post previews you can also adjust the size of the thumbnail, as well as enable/disable the “read more” link and post info bar. All thumbnails are automatically re-sized, cropped, and cached, via TimThumb which means you can change the size of your thumbnails instantly at the click of a button.

Navigation Options – The navigation options allow you to customize the navigation bar. You can use this to exclude pages from the navigation, adjust the order of the links, add a link to your Blog section (if you are using one) and so on. Both the categories and pages navigation bars can be edited here.

Advertising Management – As with the rest of my themes I have included a banner management system. You can add 125×125 and 468×60 banners and choose how many 125×125 banners you want to display (up to 8). You can also choose where you want banners to be display. You can add them to your pages sidebar, blog sidebar or both. You also have the option to disable them completely.

How To Get a License for the eBusiness Theme

If you’d like to give the eBusiness theme a try, it isn’t free, but it almost is.  Currently this theme, along with ALL of the themes released by Elegant Themes (close to 20 available currently), is available for only $19.99!  Nick, the web designer behind Elegant Themes, has also upheld a pretty impressive release schedule, offering up a new theme just about every month (which should give you close to 12 new themes each calendar year), many of which can be viewed in their theme gallery.

Learn More About the Elegant Themes Club | Sign Up for Membership

For a couple years now, the premium themes market has been growing steadily and the competition has been elevated.   Designers are pushing each other to be more innovative trying to earn your dollar, which is great for potential buyers like us, but can sometimes be difficult to for a new theme designer to jump in and hold their own.

One guy that has successfully done this, in my opinion, is Pavel Ciorici of WP Zoom.    Earlier this year he released his first premium WordPress theme, the Yamidoo theme.   The title of the theme is interesting enough that it grabs your attention, then when when you look at the theme, it is hard not be impressed!

Now, Pavel has released his second premium theme, the Zenko theme, which I wanted to mention here.  With this new magazine theme, the homepage design is a traditional magazine theme layout, but is designed in a way to feature the most important content in areas where readers will see it.   Here is a default sample of how the homepage features your top content:

Zenko Magazine Theme Homepage

The homepage is also very image intensive, which is an important part of a magazine-style homepage to draw the readers attention.   For the internal pages, the Zenko theme switches to a more traditional blog page layout with the sidebar on the right side:

Zenko Magazine Theme Post Page

A full live demo of the Zenko theme can be viewed here.

The Zenko theme also includes a number of great features.   Some of my favorite parts are the featured content and popular posts on the top of the homepage, the built-in navigation designed to function like the WP-PageNavi plugin, and of course the footer area, which was designed to provide a place for you to put your less important content (footer is a great place to put categories, archives, etc. so they are available for readers that want to find it, but is also out of the way for people not looking for it).

Other features included with the Zenko theme:

• Built in support for Google Analytics and Feedburner
• Integrated Banner Management System
• Custom templates for categories, archives
• Auto-resizing and cropping for images
• Threaded Comments for WordPress 2.7+
• Built-in widgets
• Support for WordPress 2.7.1
• Cross-Browser Compatible – tested on IE (6,7), Opera, Firefox, Safari, Chrome.
• Flickr widget
• Theme Documentation
• Integrated Theme Options
• Tabbed Widgets
• Widgetized Sidebars
• Built-in Gravatar Support for Authors & Comments
• Drop-Down Menus
• Integrated social bookmarking in posts
• Photoshop Files (.psd) included

I also had the privilege of digging through the backend of this theme and was glad to see the code structure is very SEO friendly and well setup for someone who prefers to manually hack their code.  Another thing that I really liked was the fact that this theme doesn’t require any WordPress plugins or custom fields to function properly.   I always try to find at least one thing missing, and the one feature that I couldn’t find was the option of a traditional blog template for the homepage, which has become a pretty common addition with most premium themes.

Pavel also has a very competitive pricing structure, which allows just about any WordPress user to be able to acquire one of his themes.   Currently, the Zenko theme can be purchased for $69.00 (single-use license), $119.00 (for 5 site license), or $149.00 (developer’s license).

Have questions?  Want to learn more about this theme?  Check out the official Zenko theme page by WP Zoom.

Recently our friend Andrew of WP-Fun.co.uk wrote an interesting post titled A New Name for Premium Themes:  Themes.   In his post, Andrew attempts to define what a premium WordPress theme is, then compares that definition with the most downloaded themes at the Free WordPress Theme Directory.   In my opinion, blog posts like this are great because they really spark some thought on the part of the reader.   After reading his post, I felt that the point Andrew is making is that if you look at the designs, feature sets, and quality of the most downloaded free themes from WordPress.org, they are all comparable to at least a few of the premium WordPress themes being sold on the market today. 

For those of us that have been using WordPress for at least 2-3 years, the evolution of the WordPress theme is simply amazing.  Back in 2007 themes weren’t necessarily even standards compliant, and the idea of widgets was still new and many themes didn’t support them.   Now the idea of a control panel being included with your theme, having your theme be widget ready, and having several color options included with the theme have almost become standard, (even with the free WordPress themes available).  

I’m sure there will always be some free themes available, but you have to wonder if at some point premium themes will become the standard.  I suppose if this is the case, then my next question is, if premium themes simply become themes, then what is next?   The top designers begin to release elite themes?  If premium is a fancy word for better, it seems that designers will just come up with a new fancy word for best like “elite” and use that as the word for next level of themes.  It may never end! 

There are also things like Theme Frameworks to consider as WordPress themes continue to evolve.   Give us your thoughts in the comments!

Written by Alex Denning, a Twitter fan who has finally got around to launching his own blog, Nometech.com!

Recently WordPress has had a huge popularity surge, with the rise of ‘magazine themes’. At the same time that WordPress’ popularity has soared, people have forgotten about what WP is all about: fundamentally, it is a blogging system. Trying to keep that in mind, I’m releasing my first WordPress theme, NomeBlog.

NomeBlog is as simple or as complicated as you’d like it to be; those of you who don’t have much experience coding or don’t want to edit your theme files, you can just install the theme and leave it at that. However, those of you who are into theme customization, you’re going to love NomeBlog! Why? I’ll run down some of the features:

• XHTML valid code
• Auto-image resizing
• Breadcrumbs
• Awesome jQuery navigation
• Widgetised sidebar
• Author info at the bottom of posts
• Related posts automatically displayed
• iPhone support
• ‘Login’ option displayed on the navbar to those logged in
• Customised default gravatar (+gravatar support)
• Support for WP-Pagenavi
• Sidebar blog
• Built in archive
• 125×125 ad ready
• Feedburner subscribe by email ready
• Homepage thumbnail support

NomeBlog prides itself in ease of use – I originally built the theme, or at least what I based NomeBlog on for one of my other sites, Nometet.com. Why did I build it? It was taking me too long just to post something on Nometet, resizing images, inserting custom fields; I needed something that did the hard work for me. The solution was to build the NomeBlog theme.

As I’ve already said, NomeBlog is as simple or as complicated as you’d like it to be, so I’ll quickly run through some of the more advanced features:

• phpthumb built in – the script that timthumb was built off, phpthumb is the image resizer to end all image resizers; it is great! Check out the getting started guide (link below) for details of how to use it in posts, alternatively, you can create the custom field ‘Image’ and on the homepage will be displayed a thumbnail of the image you’ve input.
• iPhone support – as I wrote here a short while ago, iPhone support is becoming increasingly a necessity. NomeBlog supports the iPhone through the use of the iWPhone plugin, which I’ve customized. You can download the customized version of the plugin (which looks great!) here.
• Customised default gravatar – fed up with random monsters and boring silhouettes being displayed next to Gravatar-less-comments? NomeBlog has built in support for your own customized Gravatar. Just upload your own image file (again, see the getting started guide) and you’re done.

It is hard to show off all the features briefly, so for the full, complete list of features and details on how to get started, check out my new blog, where there is a lengthy getting started guide. To keep updated, make sure you grab the Nometech RSS feed too!

And of course, you can view a live demo here or download the theme. It is free, but please keep the link back. Any comments would be appreciated.