Posted on August 21, 2009 - by John

Premium Wordpress themes – are they worth it?

When it comes to your blog - presentation is  pretty important. 

Updated: Poll added

People say not to judge a book by it’s cover, but we all do it conscious or otherwise! I like to think this is relevant, remember what people say about first impressions.
There are a number of popular blog authors on the internet who stick with the default theme of their chosen content management system. In my opinion  it is important to be as unique in your website design as you are in your content, and ignoring design is an unfortunate oversight.

Getting a custom made theme is not cheap, in fact in can be very expensive, and if you don’t like the free themes out there not to worry. There is middle ground between custom themes and free themes. 

You could go from a premium theme like I did.

Premium theme designers tend to give greater attention to detail to their premium designs than to their free designs and offer many great  styles and layouts. Most of which you can customise with your own logo and tweak some of the colours and layout if you are CSS minded.

The theme will not be unique to just you, others can buy them, but there is not as many users as there is with the free themes, additionaly many of premium themes such as the woothemes.com allow you to change the style of the premium theme with a click of a button, add your own design elements and you are as unique as you can afford.

Advantages to having a premium design that reflects your tastes include:

• Creates a unique blog identity.
• Creates a visual link between your content and site design.
• Allows additional customisation features, depending on requirements.
• Does not have to be extravagant and can still reflect your content.
• Support, unlike free themes – premium themes usually offer support and help documents.
• Updates, as the content management systems such as wordpress updates, it may break things in the design, some themes keep up with this and offer theme updates.

I mentioned woothemes  a moment ago and yes I love their themes, so much so that I use their design on this website and also on my humour website, as well as two others. Their themes are premium themes that you can also customise, using their build in options menu in wordpress.

The great thing about this is the themes come in different flavours, so if you select one theme you like you can select from a range of patterns and colours. They also have a few FREE themes  if you don’t feel like opening your wallet, but in my opinion they are well with it.

Here is the theme I use on this website, which I immediately feel in love with when I first saw it.

Papercut Theme for Wordpress

Paper Cut by WooThemes

Papercut is a grungy news theme with beautiful alternating stylesheets, built-in widgets, and layout control via a hand crafted theme options page. It’s the perfect out-of-the-box solution to give your website a stylish new look. Irrespective of your preferred style; Papercut will have one you like.

Check out their other themes here. Remember if you don’t like Woothemes, there are other premium theme sites out there, google is your friend!

Take part in my poll

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