It is time for us to hop off the fence and share our favourite premium themes with you. Most of the paid-for options include some amazing themes, and it really does depend on what you want your WordPress blog and/or website to do for you. We especially love working with Genesis from StudioPress and with ElegantThemes.
We’ve avoided promoting one particular premium WordPress theme for some time now, but the time has come to change that. And the winner is… well that’s obvious from the title.
PageLines was a favourite for some time due to its complete flexibility, but with the change to the new subscription model and theme it was time to review this and consider the trusty established choices.
I’ve worked with several premium themes, and still do – they often have their place for their simplicity (Thesis) or when a little quirkiness is wanted (Elegant Themes) but Headway, Thesis and iThemes are rarely used by us now – the former because I just don’t quite “get” it and the latter because it’s too expensive to maintain the developer license, and the middle because I always wanted it to do more.
Brian Clark, the founder of Studiopress, is brilliant at marketing and keeping in touch with his customers’ needs. Take a look at any of his sites and the clean layout, the usability, make it a pleasure to visit and makes us want to do the same for our own and for clients. And the Genesis framework is now a treat to work with.
We do put the themes through their paces, tweaking and bending them to what you want and rarely using the design “out of the box” – adding different colours, fonts, images and moving things about.
For the Blogmistress site we’ve taken the Genesis Mocha theme and changed the background images, the font and some colours, but other than that kept it pretty standard as I feel it will work with what we’re bringing you over the next year or so.
We’ll take a closer look at Elegant Themes next week, and for both those and Genesis we’ll be adding blog posts to help you make the most of your themes too. We’re also happy to help with questions, so fire away…