For many years now the premium themes market has been rapidly growing and evolving, with a growing number of developers taking a stab at providing WordPress users with a unique looking premium WordPress theme; however, despite all the changes and advancements over the past four years there has been one development team that has managed to maintain a spot at the top of the market, and that is the wildly popular Elegant Themes club.

For one small annual fee, the Elegant Themes club membership gives you access to their entire growing portfolio of premium themes, which as of the writing of this post currently stands at an amazing 76 premium themes. This gives you access to a large number of premium themes to choose from and is especially great for someone with limited coding skills or someone with a large number of websites/blogs. And the best part of being a member? The Elegant Themes club continues to grow each month as new premium themes are released for FREE to all of their 100,000+ members.

Each theme from Elegant Themes includes the following core list of features:

• Intuitive ePanel theme options page to give your site flexibility
• Strong focus on support and community
• Advertisement Management
• Search Engine Optimization
• Cross-browser compatibility guaranteed
• Frequent theme additions and upgrades

So why would a site dedicated to providing WordPress hacks write about Elegant Themes?  Well this week I am proud to announce that we’ve managed to partner with Elegant Themes to host a giveaway of three memberships to their exclusive theme club. If you’d like to win, all you need to do is leave a comment below explaining why you deserve to win one of these three Elegant Themes club memberships! We’ll announce the winners next Saturday, May 26th, 2012.

Update: Congrats to our winners, Marc Forrest, Steve Robillard, and Jon Owen!!

For those that follow some of the more prominent members of the WordPress community, you have probably noticed that those at the top have become a very close group.   I’ve always felt that this is a wonderful thing, but it has the side effect of making it difficult for a newcomer to break into those ranks and earn the respect of their peers.

One of those up and coming designers who is trying to get noticed is Roy Guan.  A few months ago Roy entered into the crowded premium themes community with the launching of his website, Theme Junkie.  In order to grab a foothold within this very busy space, Roy has managed to find a niche within a niche, offering all of his premium designs for under $30.00.  In only about six months time Theme Junkie has already made available a large selection of premium themes as well as two free themes.

Below I wanted to take a moment and feature a few of my favorite designs already available from Theme Junkie:

FreshLife Theme

NewsTube Theme

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Over the past two years the premium themes market has continued to innovate and prices have steadily declined to the point where you can find a nice premium theme for a very affordable price.   With that said, there still is not a better premium themes deal available than the Elegant Themes club, which gives you access to all of their premium WordPress themes for only $19.99 a year.

Thanks to a generous offer from Nick Roach, the founder of Elegant Themes, I have been given three free memberships to give away to WordPress Hacks readers.  Before I give the details of the giveaway, here are the three most recent premium WordPress themes released by Elegant Themes:

Lumin Theme

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Over the past year the premium themes market has continued to grow and expand, causing designers to search for ways to separate themselves from the competition.   Because many buyers choose to customize the design to meet their personal needs, it only makes sense for the focus of designers to instead turn to building custom settings pages that allow for a ton of flexibility.

These settings pages have become very complex in many cases and can offer a variety of features, including selecting where you want your sidebars placed, how many sidebars, which color/design style sheet should be used, or it can also offer simple things like places to enter your custom RSS feed, twitter feed, and Google Analytics code.    As I’ve watched these control panels evolve over this past year, it has been truly amazing just how much can be changed without changing a single line of code!

Nick Roach, the founder of the popular Elegant Themes theme club, has been offering complex settings panels on his themes for as long as I can remember, but earlier this week I was given a peak at the new revamped settings panel named ePanel.  This new settings panel is extremely complex and will eventually be added to all of the themes included with an Elegant Themes club membership.   As of today’s date, ePanel is already integrated into the following themes and available for download: eBusiness, eNews, ePhoto, PureType, Bold, and CherryTruffle.  Nick promises that the remaining themes will receive the same treatment over the coming month(s) and all themes will include this new ePanel.

So, what exactly is ePanel?   Here is a screen shot of the updated design:

As you can see from the screen shot above, there are a few bonus tabs under the General Settings tab alone, and there are a total of 8 tabs down the left sidebar.   The General Settings has the following 3 tabs:  General, Homepage, and Featured Slider.

After loading up the theme to see how the settings panel works, I have to say I am very impressed!   It looks like the General tab (under General Settings) allows you to select the style sheet color you want to use, enable/disable blog formatting on the homepage, Feedburner integration including all your Feedburner settings, and selecting the date format (dates are displayed differently depending on what part of the world you live in).   In the Homepage tab you’ll get access to category display, as well as the ability to exclude certain categories of your choice.  Of course the Featured Slider tab allows you to control how the featured slider works.

That is just the beginning though, as on the left there is also a series of tabs which include a large number of other settings.   You’ll find Navigation options, Layout Settings, Ad Management settings, Colorization, and you’ll even be able to control certain SEO settings on the SEO tab (mostly meta information similar to how All-in-One SEO Pack works).

The best part is that all this new functionality is available for all Elegant Themes club members!   Currently a membership to Elegant Themes is only $19.99 for an entire year, and stays at that price in order to renew your yearly membership.  You can learn more about the Elegant Themes club here.

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.