Over the years it has been interesting to watch the WordPress themes market both grow and evolve.  If you had asked me back in 2007 where I thought WordPress theme were going, I would have guessed that we were headed towards a strong focus on designs. Instead over the last year especially designs have moved more towards efficiency and simplicity with a focus placed on custom widgets and customizable control panels.  These simple designs seem to allow bloggers to get all the features they want and then customize the simple designs to meet their individual needs.

One design that recently caught my eye is the new TypeMagz theme by ColorLabs Project.   This website has been around for years now thanks to the extremely popular Arthemia theme, but rather than going with a magazine format, this new design instead places a focus on gathering and presenting news on the homepage.   Here is a sample of how one configuration of the homepage may look:

TypeMagz Homepage Design

For internal pages the website converts to a blog format which includes many of the standard blogging features you’ve come to expect from WordPress:

TypeMagz Blog Design

Although this theme isn’t for every type of website/blog, if you run a website which manages a ton of content, the TypeMagz theme may be just what you are looking for.  Like any good news-styled template, this theme really excels by taking a bunch of information and displaying it in one easy and convenient page where you can point readers to.

As you’d expect in today’s market all these features aren’t free, but the template is definitely affordable when compared to the competition.  The TypeMagz theme is available for $50.00 for a single-use license, or a developer’s license is also available for $200.00.   If TypeMagz isn’t for you, you can view all of the themes available from ColorLabs Project here, including their other new design, the Wellblog theme.

After speaking with my good friend Adii of Premium News Themes, it looks like he has made a bold, yet wise decision to move his Premium News business to the new domain Woo Themes.  Obviously moving your website to a new domain can be a big hassle (I’ve done it 4 times in the past year for a few of my websites and it was a lot of work), but in this situation I really think it was the right and necessary move for the growth of his business.

So, why did Adii move his online business to a new home?  One very important word…brandability.  When he launched Premium News Themes, it was originally to sell one theme, the original Premium News theme.  Since then, his business has expanded drastically, and that domain was limiting him to releasing only news WordPress themes.

So, now the Premium News Themes can be found over at Woo Themes.   What other changes were included with the domain transfer?

1. Woo Themes Team Grows – The Woo Themes team has added a new member named Elliot Jay Stocks.   I’m not familiar with Elliot’s work, but more people probably means faster theme production and more choices.
2. Woo Themes Club – This is an interesting idea for a subscription-based WordPress themes club that appears to be set to replace the concept of an All-Inclusive Package we’ve seen other designers do.  The cheapest membership is $150.00 quarterly, but that gives you access to all existing Woo Themes as well as any new themes.
3. Regular Theme Releases – The Woo Themes team is committed to releasing at least 1 new premium theme each month, with many months have 2 new premium themes.
4. Two New Premium Themes – You can now purchase two new premium WordPress themes.  They are VibrantCMS and ProudFolio.
5. New Prices - All Woo Themes (previously Premium News Themes) are now available at premanently reduced prices.  You can get a single license for $70.00 or a developer’s license for $150.00.

Overall, I am impressed with the new setup and I think it will be interesting to see how this changes the premium WordPress themes market.  How will having a team instead of an individual improve both production and support?  Will their price reduction force the competition to reduce their prices?  Will their twist on the theme club idea take off?

Check out the new and improved Woo Themes.

It looks like the crew over at Premium News has been busy, releasing their eighth theme in the last five months. This premium WordPress theme is called Fresh News, and it was based upon the extremely popular Flash edition news theme.

Here are some of the features included with the Fresh News theme:

• Automatic Image Resizer (requires PHP GD Library to work)
• Custom Page Templates for Archives, Sitemap & Image Gallery
• Built-in Gravatar Support for Authors & Comments
• Author Profiles & Archives
• Featured news section
• Video Panel (for use with Flash videos)
• Traditional Blog Layout (for homepage)
• Integrated aside / sideblog section within the sidebar of the theme (optional)
• Navigation Dropdown Menu’s
• Sidebar Tabbed Box
• 2 different homepage layouts (featured section)
• Widgetized sidebars
• Integrated Banner Ad Management
• Integrated Flickr & Feedburner

Upon first glance, there are two things that jump out at me about this theme. I don’t believe previous versions of premium News themes have had multiple colors (I could be wrong), but Fresh News comes with 6 different colors to choose from.

The other really neat thing you get is something that I’ve been suggesting premium theme designers do for months now, and that is to provide a blogging template with the theme. It looks like if you purchase the Fresh News theme, you will get a blogging template that you can use. This opens up a lot more options for a potential buyer and creates more appeal to bloggers that don’t want a content management homepage.

Here are some screenshots of Fresh News:

Homepage

Post Page

This theme comes with everything you’ve come to expect from the News theme crew, and it is available at the same price. You can purchase a single-use license for $99.95 or a multiple-use license for $249.95.

Check out the Fresh News WordPress theme!

Today Adii of Premium News announced that he is giving away an all-inclusive Premium News theme package (valued at $499.95) for free to one random person that writes a post talking about it.   The lucky winner gets all 7 themes for free, as well as a copy of any future themes that are released.

Also in his post, Adii announced that he has completed updates to his original four themes and those that have purchased the theme are entitled to a free update.  If you didn’t get an e-mail from him, you’ll want to contact him.

Over the past 4 months since Premium News was launched, Adii and friends have been developing a strong presence in the premium WordPress themes niche.

It all started with the Premium News theme where bloggers were given their first taste of what a news CMS using WordPress can look like. In the time since then, many themes have followed, with the most recent additions (Flash News and Gazette Editions) quickly rising in popularity. Now today it looks like the newest Premium News theme is available, this time being released as a series.

This series is called the Live Wire series, and here are some of the features you can expect in this addition:

• Auto Image Resizer - No more do you need to upload various sizes of images to make the featured posts and thumbnails look great – instead you now only upload one image of any size and our back-end does the rest.
• Author Profiles – We focused a lot of attention and making the author profiles and archives in this theme, really, really pop. This feature makes the Live Wire theme perfectly suited to multi-author blogs. We also included our built-in Gravatar support to display author thumb images.
• Built-in Gravatars – As mentioned above, we’ve included Gravatar functionality into the theme and it works without you having to install a plugin. The use of Gravatars can also be easily switched on and off.
• Custom Page Templates - The theme now includes custom page templates for General Archives, a Sitemap and Image Galleries.
• Color Schemes - Every theme also includes 4 different color schemes to cater for everyone’s taste!
• The Rest – Featured panel, video panel, drop-down menu’s, a tabbed box in the sidebar, integrated banner ad management and lastly easily integrated Flickr & Feedburner.

Here are some screen shots of the new series:

Live Wire 2.0

Live Wire Edition

Live Wire Style

What is the price? True to the previous pricing structure, these themes are $99.95 each for a single-use license. If you would rather purchase a developer’s license, you can get that for $249.95. All three themes are interchangeable, and purchasers of the developers license will get all 12 styles!

Check out the Live Wire Premium News Themes