Very few of us come to WordPress knowing how to get the most out of SEO, coding, and design elements, but most of us come with the desire to create something unique. If your resources don’t stretch to hiring a personal in-house site team, premium WordPress theme providers offer the best way to put your own ideas on a framework that will deliver professional results.
Organic Themes
The name says it all; Organic Themes creates original themes with an emphasis on clean code and creative design. It is mainly geared toward small businesses, artists and bloggers. Customers have the option of purchasing the all-inclusive “Developers Pack,” which includes access to every current and future themes, as well as support and upgrades.
In addition to the self-evident Magazine, Business, News, and Portfolio themes, many of the choices can suit a wider range than the titles might suggest (the Health & Beauty Theme easily suits literary or lifestyle sites, for example). Personalization options are purposely kept manageable rather than overwhelming, but customers have plenty of options to make the themes their own.
Organic Themes provide clean, compatible, and quick-loading code, along with optimized designs. While extremely friendly to beginners, the hands-on customer will benefit greatly from an extensive amount of on-site resources, including general and theme-specific tutorials, FAQs, hosting information, and an active community forum.
Elegant Themes
Elegant Themes offers the full selection of Nick Roach’s 50+ expertly designed themes for a single, affordable price. Start by choosing one of the many beautiful and meticulously designed templates, personalize with a surprisingly flexible range of “ePanel” options, and back it up with proven support from Nick himself (and the community, of course).
Although there’s no menu to help sort the themes by specific layout types, simply browsing the collection will quickly give you an idea of which are best suited for blogging, e-commerce, directory, mobile, media gallery, helpdesk, et cetera, and each theme’s features list clearly explains its unique applications and benefits.
The price is a recurring yearly subscription, and does not cover distribution. This means Elegant Themes is most suited for someone with multiple sites of their own and less attractive for a developer with various clients.
Thesis Themes
With over 46,000 users, you’d expect Thesis Themes to deliver both results and flexibility. The basic core benefits include coding for faster page loads and advanced Search-Engine Optimization, but the beauty of the Thesis framework comes from the “option panels,” which allow single users and developer deployments alike the opportunity for hands-on personalization without ever needing to get into the coding.
Thesis rightly emphasizes the importance of typography, touting “maximum readability” as another core benefit. Start with the “layout generator” and tweak to your heart’s content with “pin-point control” of fonts. The range of design options is vast, but Thesis manages to keep the menu clean and intuitive, which means that you can easily get an optimized features and teasers site up and running in no time, and then personalize it further in almost countless ways.
The members-only forum features the excellent Thesis support staff to answer questions, but you may find even more help from the active and experienced community.
Headway Themes
Headway isn’t a theme collection, but more of a theme construction set. The What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interface takes previewing a step further by allowing you to interact with the design elements themselves, a drag-and-drop (and draw) experience that makes Headway 3 one of the most intuitive and user-friendly site-building tools imaginable.
Yet there’s still access to familiar WordPress essentials and advanced coding tools if you want them, including a live CSS editor (allowing you to see the changes as you type them), a custom API block creator, and even an ‘app marketplace’ to buy and sell custom blocks. The SEO options are also extensive (Headway claims that even the default options will immediately improve your results), and the support includes both an actively involved community and dev team.
Three pricing tiers are available, with upper levels adding child theme support and even developer webinars.
What do you look for in a quality WordPress theme?
About Guest Blogger
Sean is blogger with ambitions of traveling and learning about different cultures across the globe. When he’s not scoping his next destination find him contributing to ATTSavings or @SeanTR.
