Hi this is a test post la okay? Yes it looks pretty good, oh well thanks very much he said, it makes me fuzzy inside.

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WordPress themes are big business — huge business in fact. At the time of writing there were approximately 4.5 million monthly searches on Google for “WordPress themes” and “themes for WordPress”. All things considered that’s just the tip of the iceberg, given the number of search iterations possible. So the numbers are massive and why wouldn’t they be? WordPress is hugely popular these days and using themes and plugins provides an almost unlimited array of possibilities when creating and building WordPress websites.

It’s hard to estimate how many individual WordPress themes are available on the net today, the numbers are once again gargantuan. WordPress.org is nearing 1,500 (with nearly 45 million downloads) and the number of specialised theme websites out there is almost uncountable. Searching Google for the previously mentioned “WordPress themes” turns up a whopping 73 million results and I’ll be dammed if anyone here has time to trawl through that lot!

As we’re unlikely to be the only ones in this predicament we thought it might be nice to provide a overview of (some of) the available options. The following is a summary of the more popular WordPress theme websites out there. It’s true that most of them do require payment, but when considering your options bear in mind the amount of time it would take to design a website of the calibre you see before you. Thanks to the power of the internet and popularity of WordPress, designers are able to market their themes on a global scale and thereby offer them for a fraction of what it would cost in time or commission charges if you were to go it alone. For that reason they really are great value for money and our list of WordPress theme providers represent (in no particular order) what we believe to be the best of the bunch.

Elegant Themes

The goal of Elegant Themes is to provide simple, professional and elegant WordPress themes. At the time of writing there were a total of 74 WordPress themes available to members at an annual cost of $ 39. All themes are coded using valid XHTMI and CSS and are widget ready, meaning that your site will be compliant and function exactly as you’d expect. Once you’ve paid the membership fee the themes can be used on as many WordPress sites as you like and some are even ready for Google adsense. There are a smorgasbord of ShortCodes available for use with any of the themes which make it extremely easy to add things like buttons, columns, lists and the like extending the basic functionality of all the WordPress themes. All up we think Elegant Themes provides great value for money and offer a fantastic choice of themes.

Woo Themes

Woo Themes have 126 WordPress themes available which are all built using the same framework, designed to ease setup and configuration of WordPress websites and appropriate Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). All of the theme designs are visually stunning and 2 new ones are added each month, including in some cases eCommerce ready designs. For the latter variety to work it’s necessary to use them in conjunction with the WooCommerce plugin which will add functionality to deal with reporting, shipping, inventory and all the other usual requisites that come with running an online store. There are a variety of packages available which start at $ 70 for the most basic (access to 3 themes), moving to $ 200 per year for the developer club subscription which gives you access to everything — photoshop files and all.

WordPress.org Themes

Mentioned above, the mighty WordPress.org has a current total of almost 1,500 themes which are all free to download and use to style a WordPress website. Naturally they don’t come with as many bells and whistles but some do look quite nice, depending on your websites purpose and needs. Perhaps one of the greatest problems faced with going down this route is taking the time to trawl through the pages in the hope that you’ll find a worthwhile theme to use. Many of the themes have a nice clean look but the focus here is mainly on using WordPress for blooging, rather than as a Content Management System (CMS). If you’re interested in some free WordPress themes with a wider scope check out this article on SmashingMagazine which provides a nice roundup from 2011.

Themify

Themify builds professional WordPress themes that are highly customisable and easy to use. Every theme comes with an advanced option panel where you can easily customise your theme without having to edit any template files. It also includes a number of custom widgets for displaying recent comments, feature posts, Twitter feeds, and Flickr photos etc…. Like Elegant Themes, it comes with shortcodes which allow you to easily display buttons, column content, horizontal rules, quotations, Google maps, and embedded videos. There are currently 24 WordPress themes available and the development team seems to be reasonably active, meaning that by the time you read this the number will surely have risen.

Organic Themes

Organic Themes from Hawaii offers a variety of premium WordPress themes for artists, businesses and bloggers. Their collection of themes is continually growing to suit the needs of customers with new releases on a regular basis and continuous updates for existing themes. They are compatible with the major browsers including Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and even Internet Explorer, mobile friendly and W3C compliment. With the purchase of all WordPress themes customers also receive access to a helpful support forums, documentation, design files and demo content. The themes all have a fresh and professional look across a range of areas so could be just what you’re looking for.

WPZOOM

WPZOOM is a web-studio located in Moldova that specialise in creating themes for WordPress. The project began in 2008 as a blog about WordPress themes which quickly grew in popularity, driving the released the very first WordPress Theme by February 2009. At the moment there are approximately 50 themes in the gallery, which are used on thousands of websites. Continual development of new themes and updates of the existing portfolio with new features and improvements makes the developer membership attractive, albeit with a hefty $199 sign-up fee. Single themes are priced at $69 and come with premium lifetime support, documentation, tutorials and all the usual options and features.

Theme Forest

Theme Forrest is part of the Evanto marketplace which allows anyone to buy or sell digital goods such as WordPress themes. They have a wide selection of WordPress themes available for individual purchase, ranging in price from $5–$35. Categories such as retail, technology, mobile and eCommerce ensure a reasonably generic spread of choice, driven by the contributing designers. Given this is a marketplace there is no overarching feel to the themes, as found with some of the other sites, so the choices are much more varied. For similar reasons to WordPress.org it might take a while to find something you like here, but the presence of categories such as those mentioned above certainly assists in that respect.

Templatic

Previously known as PremiumThemes, Templatic was established in 2008 with a total of 25 WordPress themes. Since this time their portfolio has grown steadily and Templatic, a place for “awesome premium WordPress themes not available anywhere” evolved out of the primeval ether in December 2009. The themes are easy to use and implement using the custom control panel and are professionally coded to maximise search engine exposure. Members can access advanced tips and tutorials and all of the themes are ready for advert ready if you’re heading down that route. There are curretnly over 70 WordPress themes available at either $65 for a standard or $95 for a development license.

Viva Themes

Viva Themes create quality and professionally designed WordPress themes for your business, blog or personal sites. There is a reasonable selection available (35), starting at $45 per theme. If you’re a developer then the all themes pack, priced at a reasonable $160 might take your fancy. Of course they all come with excellent free support, WordPress version and cross-browser compatibility, shortcodes and widget areas providing full customisation features expected from premium themes.

Solostream

Solostream’s mission is to create easily accessible content, products and services that help small businesses, organisations and individuals use the web to more quickly launch and grow their online presence, streamline and simplify their operations and connect and collaborate with others through the Internet. We asked Solostream if they provide shortcodes and were told that the implementation is currently begin investigated. Whilst there are no dedicated eCommerce themes available we were also told that a group of users have managed to successfully use the Shopp plugin to achieve this goal. They also provide custom WordPress theme design and have 11 themes that are completely free. Nice touch!

Theme Frameworks

The last few sites that we are going to mention are a little different. Whilst they do provide theme like functionality they are complete frameworks built on top of WordPress and designed to provide the greatest degree of flexibility and ease of development possible. That said they will certainly require a greater amount of work to get going than the other options that we’ve detailed above, but would certainly provide a more individual looking site at the end of it.

PageLines is a drag and drop website framework for WordPress that allows both beginners and professionals to easily build a professional websites. Features include a responsive and mobile design, drag and drop layout control, section cloning, detailed colour and background controls, page-by-page settings, custom typography (with over 50 fonts), special page handling with controls for every type of page, a PageLines marketplace to buy and sell drag-and-drop apps and much more.

Thesis Theme is reasonably well known amongst the WordPress community and, testament to its excellence, has been implemented on over 45,000 WordPress websites to date. Some of them do look really impressive so we suggest you take a look for some inspiration if you’re looking for a bespoke solution to your WordPress website design.

Summary

Like we said, the world of WordPress themes is immense. If you need help narrowing down the list a little we’ve tabulated the above sites into a condensed form below. Please note that all of the information and figures you see presented were correct at the time of publication in February/March 2012.

Theme Website	Cost	No. Themes	eCommerce	ShortCodes
Elegant Themes	$39/year	74
Woo Themes	$70–$200	126
WordPress.org Themes	$0 (Free)	1,487
Themify	$39–$89	24
Organic Themes	$69–$249	17
WPZOOM	$69–$299	49
Theme Forest	$12–$60	1,482
Templatic	$65–$99	72
Viva Themes	$45–$160	35
Solostream	$0–$129	35

The Final Word

Themes were introduced to WordPress in version 1.5 back in February 2005 and since that time have risen in popularity to almost epic proportions. It could be argued that the introduction of themes and their adoption has helped to drive the evolution of WordPress from a blogging platform into the fully fledged CMS that it is today. There is no doubt that the relationship is symbiotic, ongoing and has made the job of site builders, freelancers and web agencies much easier, almost to the point of delivering a complete plug-and-play development stream. Almost, because in reality there is often a need to implement minor tweaks — but that’s another article altogether.

What do you think? Do you have a particular favorite or suggestion that we’ve missed out from the list above? Let us know in the comments below.

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Scrybes

We hope that you’re all familiar with the great little plugin produced by Scryb.es for WordPress, which simplifies the addition of social network icons to connect your blog. Judging by the number of downloads it’s popular enough, but what about those cases when you need a little more dynamic content included? Luckily this is WordPress we’re talking about and there are a wealth of options available to you.

If you’re looking to narrow the list down somewhat Trevor’s written up a nice little summary over at 1stWebDesigner, detailing 10 such plugins which vary from adding an animated twitter bird to tracking social metrics. Check out the link below to see the full list and don’t forget to take a look at Social Connect while you’re at it too — sometimes less really is more!

>> 10 WordPress Plugins For Easy Social Sharing

Scrybes

Parse.ly have recently released Dash, a flagship product designed to work as a content optimisation platform by using predictive analytical algorithms to track trends across the web.

Essentially Dash is an analytics tool, albeit one with a difference. Using Dash a blog editor, writer or administrator can track the performance of authors, follow trends, page views and traffic patterns on millions of pages across the internet. To make sense of this mountain of data a predictive analysis engine is built into Dash, which makes recommendations on the latest topics for authors to write about. Simply put, a Dash user has at their disposal a toolkit with which to capitalise on worldwide trends before they take off and become second-hand news, paving the way to a powerful content strategy. Naturally, promoting in-demand content before others drives more traffic to a site, which in turn leads to more growth. Sweet.

Whilst the product looks awesome there is, as always, a downside— and that’s the cost. Starting at $ 499 per month Dash is not cheap. Whilst it’s clear that Parse.ly’s sights are firmly zeroed in on the corporate enterprise market there are likely to be a huge number of bloggers out there who would love to play with Dash, but will find it financially prohibitive to consider. Nevertheless, for those who can afford it Parse.ly looks like a surefire way to stay ahead of the game in an increasingly competitive market.

>> Insights for the web’s best publishers.

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If you find the basic user management features of WordPress a little lacklustre we suggest that you take a look at this post over at 1stwebdesigner.com. They detail 5 tips which could help you out. Ranging from using plugins to enhance he registration process, exporting user data to providing a way for users to access their browsing history it’s a good place to start if you’d like to upgrade the stock WordPress functionality.

>> 5 Must-Know Tips for Better WordPress User Management

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We’ve been meaning to write a post about WiziApp for a while now. Currently in open beta, the product provides a means to easily convert WordPress sites into fully fledged, native iPhone apps.

With WiziApp all posts, images, videos, pages and galleries are displayed in a native iPhone user interface that includes a comments system and push notification service for maximum communication with your audience. Usage is simple. Download and install the plugin, configure it and then publish to the app store. During the setup choices such as the app’s name, splash screen and various design and navigation options are made. One particular feature we like is that changes are displayed in real-time on an iPhone simulator. Nice touch.

On the backend WiziApp is fully integrated with the WordPress admin panel so stats on the number of daily downloads, visits and app store updates can easily be viewed on the spot, making it super easy to stay up to date with your apps progress.

Cost-wise there is an initial setup fee, following which a monthly subscription is also payable – the amount of which varies depending on the number of push notifications that you require. It’s also possible to monetise the app using an AdMob account (except at the basic ‘personal blog’ level), which allows you to keep 100 % of the advertising revenue generated. Depending on the number of pages you serve this may help to offset the monthly charges, making it a cost neutral exercise to implement a native browsing experience on iOS.

As highlighted by the developers, iOS users spend almost 90 % more time using apps than mobile browsing. That said, if you’re running (or building) a content rich WordPress powered site it’s a surefire way to increase your audience numbers — especially when considering the continuing upward trend in smartphones use.

>> WiziApp — WordPress for iPhone

Scrybes

Scrybes are pleased to announce the release of a WordPress widget designed to simplify the process of adding links to the common social media sites. The idea was born out of our own desire to add icons to the footer of the website. We found that whilst there were plenty of options to add dynamic icons that also display the number of tweets or likes for a particular page or post, there was no static solution available. In the interest of a clean and simple design, which the former Mr Jobs has shown can be extremely successful, we wanted nice looking static icons to link with our Facebook and Twitter pages. The first iteration was hard coded but we decided to convert the idea into a fully fledged widget for the wider community to make use of. You can see an example of the plugin at the bottom of the Scrybes website and we plan to continue adding support for more networks and anything else our users desire. Keep up to date by following the Scrybes blog and if you do find the plugin useful please consider liking us on Facebook or sending out a Tweet to say thanks.

>> Social Connect Widget

Scrybes

As our existing customers know, at Scrybes we are constantly striving to improve the quality of our WordPress hosting service. That’s why we’re extremely excited to announce a new partnership with CloudFlare, arguably the web’s best website security and speed enhancement system. We partnered with CloudFlare because they have a simple and free solution to help protect and accelerate any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare network, your website loads twice as fast and is protected from a range of online threats.

Scrybes are delighted to offer the CloudFlare setup, activation, and service to all of our customers for FREE. Turning CloudFlare on and off though Scrybes cPanel takes two clicks after activation and the benefits are immediate and plentiful. For example, on average, a site on CloudFlare:

• Loads twice as fast
• Uses 60% less bandwidth
• Sees 65% fewer requests
• Is way more secure

To learn more, you can watch the CloudFlare video below or head over to their site for a more comprehensive overview of their service. Overall, we have been super impressed and we are excited to offer this service to Scrybes customers, both old and new. Enjoy the enhancements and, as ever, do let us know what you think using any of the usual methods.

Us in 90 Seconds from CloudFlare on Vimeo.

Scrybes

Daniel Pataki over at Smashing Magazine has recently produced yet another great WordPress tutorial. The article provides a walkthrough on how to upgrade and improve the emails sent from your WordPress system, meaning you can jazz up communications using css and html tricks. The premise is simple, create a new email template, modify the WordPress mailer function to use it and then after that work on improving the default system emails. Finally the tutorial also demonstrates how to hook your emails into different events to customise the whole process, leaving you with a hugely improved and flexible email system to impress your users with. Thanks Dan!

>> Create Perfect Emails for your WordPress Website

Scrybes

If you’re the author of a WordPress theme that contains anything more than a modest number of options, you might want to consider implementing a tabbed browsing structure. This can really help to organise and streamline your users interactions, providing a more pleasant experience and setting your theme apart from the rest. Elio Rivero has a tutorial available over at Smashing Magazine that details how a tabbed settings page can be created, complete with an example that implements the approach. A full explanation of the code is provided and although it might take a bit of work the rewards could be advantageous, especially if you’re looking to enhance the usability of your theme and clarify its options.

>> How To Create Tabs On WordPress Settings Pages

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