Premium WordPress themes, where for art thou?

Seeing as I wrote an article about some of the Free WordPress themes I like to work with, learn from, etc. I figured I should follow it up with a Premium WordPress themes article.

First off what is a Premium WordPress theme?

The main definition is a simple one, it’s a theme that you pay for.

Now here’s where it gets tricky, WordPress is released under a GPL license and there is plenty of argument over whether or not you should be able to charge for themes under that licensing.

My 2 cents on it is that it’s kind of shady to charge for the theme itself, however charging for support and customizing the theme for a specific person is OK. Anyway, we’re not here to argue that point so let’s move on.

If you Google ‘Premium WordPress Theme‘ you’ll get a whole load of results, some are good and some are crap at best but how do you work that out before you pay for the theme / support? The better Premium WordPress developers out there will have some of these things, and I wouldn’t look at paying for a theme without ticking at least a couple of these off;

Demonstration of theme – this is a very basic thing to offer, how else will you know how the theme performs up front if you can’t see a working demo? You’d be suprised how many people don’t do this.

Tutorials, text and video – again this is another simple thing to offer. We’ve just bought your theme, now how the hell do we configure to look as cool as the demo?

User Forum / Group – if for any reason the theme developer is unable to answer your question because they are away, sick, etc. it’s great when there’s a user forum, chances are someone else has had the exact same problem and can easily talk you through it.

There are a bunch of other things the better Premium WordPress theme developers offer so that you will chose their products over others, things like installation services, logo customization, etc. that can be very handy but the main things to check for are those top three items.

• Revolution Themes are awesome, you’ve heard me rave about Brian’s work before I’m sure. In terms of Premium WordPress themes Brian’s support via the faq’s, video tutorials, support forum, etc. is second to none in my opinion. His code is clean as a whistle and so easy to work with…..fanboy rant over.
• Woo Themes haven’t been around for all that long, even though all the designers that work there have had huge amounts of experience in designing for WordPress, however Woo Themes already has a brilliant selection of ‘club’ themes on. Their theme support is rock solid as well.
• iThemes pretty well have a theme for every occasion, a lot of them are designed for business use however there are some that are designed for magazine use, social networking, and personal blogs.
• Graph Paper Press make a whole load of cool themes for WordPress. A lot of them are designed with photographers in mind with big front page photos and thumbnails for pretty well all of the content.
• Pro Theme Design is kind of a new one to me, even though I’ve known of their themes before and even mentioned Mimbo in other blogs. Pro Theme Design are the guys who sell off Darren Hoyt’s Premium WordPress themes, ie. Mimbo Pro.

You might note that these are mostly magazine style themes, the reason behind that is it’s pretty easy to put your own two or three column blog style theme together that a vast majority of those themes are free, check out my last article on Free WordPress themes for more info.

Anyway, hope this helps you with your decision when you’re looking at buying a Premium WordPress theme in the future, alternatively you could always hire a freelance website developer…haha.