iTheme bSocial Premium WordPress Theme

Because WordPress is free you don’t have to spend money purchasing it,so with the money you’ll save you can afford to get a great looking premium theme—and it’ll still be cheaper than a custom-designed site.

When you purchase a premium theme you can avoid the somewhat shoddy work that sometimes shows up in free themes. That’s not to say free themes aren’t any good, because many of them are great themes, but often a lot of the detail  work that really makes a theme special is missing.

Anyone can put together a free theme and offer it to the public, but it takes a lot more skill, care, and dedication to build themes people are actually willing to pay money for.

One the other side of the coin, just because you pay for a theme doesn’t mean it’s worth what you paid for it. There are bad premium themes, good premium themes, and great premium themes. And even the good and great ones may not work to exactly fill your needs.

This article is all about helping you make intelligent decisions when choosing premium themes.

Some things we will discuss:

iTheme BizCard Premium WordPress Theme

1. Things to consider and plan for before you even start looking at themes.

2. How can you best assess a theme’s quality?

3. What you should be getting when you purchase a premium WordPress theme.

Item 1: Needs, Wants, and Expectations

The very first step to selecting a premium theme is to gauge your own needs, wants, and expectations. You surely can’t pick the right theme if you don’t even know what’s right for you and what you really need.

So, first step, before you start looking at all of the really cool themes and get excited about all of the really fancy designs, you need to sort out what it is that you really need and want.  What do you really want your site to look like, and what do you want it to do?

And before you even do that first step, you should probably understand what you’re getting in a premium theme.

What, exactly, makes a theme a Premium Theme?

No discussion on premium themes would be complete if it didn’t answer one question: What is a premium theme?

There are a lot of different opinions on what a premium theme should include, including but not limited to:
customization, documentation, support, higher quality code, better “design” work, etc.

What it comes down to though is that a premium theme is a theme you pay for, it’s as simple as that. All the other potential extras and goodies depend on what the creator of the theme actually delivers to you.

You can see some demo sites featuring premium themes at iTheme and Revolution.

For sure, not all premium theme creators are equal, and not all premium themes are equal. Everyone has a different opinion on what makes a theme great. Where one premium theme creator may have a lot of professional experience, another may only produce themes as a hobby. Both themes may be equally good but you’ll get a different experience from each.

iTheme Grunge Premium WordPress Theme

If you choose to buy a theme from a hobbyist you can’t expect the levels of support a pro-theme creator can offer. If you buy a theme from a company that offers premium themes as a second thought, you might get terrible or non-existant service. These are things you need to consider.

Bottom line, do your research, don’t let slick marketing fool you, and make your decision based on facts.

What Do You Need in a Website, what do you need it to do?

Before you start picking themes you need to make some decisions. If you don’t do your homework now, you may end up regretting it later. The most important thing to figure out is what you need your website to do.

• What type of content do you need to manage?
• Do you need blog capabilities (news, portfolio, press releases, catalog, etc.)?
• Does your site need a specific call to action (like an e-commerce component)?
• How many pages will your site need?
• Will those pages need a hierarchy?
• What do you want to show or feature on the homepage?

These are the sort of questions you need to answer. You’re trying to figure out what you need
from your website. Once you have that sorted out, it’s easier to find a theme that offers what you need.

What Kind of Theme Should You Buy?

One of the most common mistakes in choosing a theme is assuming it will fit your needs. Premium themes
come in all shapes and sizes and colors. Some focus on a specific need while others focus on generic blogging.

iTheme eCommerce Premium WordPress Theme

Some themes are designed to put the focus on the content. At the other extreme are the corporate themes. These tend to focus on static pages and relegate the blog content to a small news section. The key is to not make assumptions about what the theme will or won’t do.

Shown above is the iTheme eCommerce premium WordPress theme that I chose to use on my web site at TutorDaddy.com.  This is a good example of a specialized premium WordPress theme, in this case the theme was designed to showcase an ecommerce web site.

Just because WordPress is a blogging platform doesn’t mean that any theme will be great for blogging. WordPress is extremely flexible and more and more themes are focusing on sites that don’t focus on blogging at all.

What Features Do You Need?

Before you start shopping for themes you should decide what features you need. Some features may appeal to you when you read about the theme and view the demo, but if you don’t really need them then you may be paying for something you’ll never use.

In some cases those fancy features could actually interfere with what you do actually need. Finding the right theme for your needs is much more practical than finding a cool looking theme and bending and sacrificing your needs to make it work.

Here are just a few examples of some features that are available on premium themes:

• Featured post on the home page instead of the latest post
• Featured photographs from Flickr
• Featured video(s) from YouTube
• Advertising integration (Adsense, etc)
• Advertising management features
• Optional color themes to choose from
• Control panels for easily adding tracking code or feed URLs
• Header image replacement, resizing, and cropping capabilities
• Contact form (so you don’t publicize your email address to spammers)
• Tabbed sidebars
• Tabbed featured posts
• Multiple positions for sidebars and widget capable sidebars
• Multiple page layouts
• Menus auto generated from WordPress pages
• Menus auto generated from categories
• Menus generated from the blogroll
• Manual menu control
• Drop down menus
• Built in asides / sideblog
• Advanced search functionality
• Niche specific templates; e.g. real estate, auto sales, photography, etc
• E-commerce integration if desired
• Image / banner rotation if desired
• Reordering the home page
• Alternative graphics packs
• And more…

There are so many choices that you have your work cut out for you in choosing that “just right” theme.

Revolution Music Premium WordPress Theme

How Much Customization Are You Really Capable Of And Comfortable With?

If the thought of writing or changing code or installing plugins makes you nervous, you better pick a theme that has everything you need out of the box. On the other hand, if you’re fine with tweaking code, installing plugins or adjusting the CSS, then you can be a lot more flexible when you pick a theme.

A lot of the features shown above are built right into some premium themes, and many of them can
easily be added to themes with plugins. If you’re OK making some of those changes yourself, it might give you a little more leeway in choosing a theme you like for other reasons.

Next up in Part 2, we’ll cover specific details on what to look for when choosing a premium theme.

Lewis Poteet
http://www.TutorDaddy.com
http://www.TutorDaddyTraining.com

If you’re a web site designer/builder, whether highly experienced or  raw beginner, and you haven’t yet used WordPress to build a web site, you’ve definitely missed out on one of the quickest, easiest, and cheapest ways to build a professional looking web site.

If you think WordPress is just for blogging and bloggers and not useful for much of anything else, then you need to think again.

WordPress is a powerful, versatile, customizable, easy to install, and low priced(as in free) platform to build your web site on.

There are boat loads of free and premium WordPress themes available so you can quickly and easily transform a Plain-Jane looking site into a highly professional looking site that rivals the work of professional web site designers.

Using just a few of the many plugins available for WordPress, you can turn your WordPress web site into a highly functional and highly automated web site that would make any geeky web site code writer turn green with envy.

In addition to the hundreds of free themes available for WordPress you should also consider some of the highly specialized premium themes available that can have your WordPress web site installed, running, and looking great, and at a very reasonable cost.

Specialized premium themes are available to showcase sites such as music, news, photo sites, real estate, sports, sports teams, grunge, ecommerce, corporate, business, blogging, social, magazines, technology, and more.

A really cool looking feature that has recently become available from one leading premium theme provider is flash-like fading photos in a “featured” area on the front page. These create a really sharp looking effect. Take a look at the demo site featuring  Titanium Premium WordPress Theme to see this in action.

Two of my personal favorite custom theme providers, the ones I have chosen to use on my own web sites, are iTheme Premium WordPress Themes and Revolution Premium WordPress Themes.

Plugins, of which there are hundreds and hundreds available, are add-on features that you can quicky and easily install in your WordPress site. Most of them are free to download and install while others are sold at prices that are usually very reasonable for the work that they can perform for you.

There are plugins that will handle SEO(search engine optimization) chores on your web site. There are plugins that will auto-backup your database and email you the backup files. There are plugins that will install Adsense ads on your site.

There are plugins that will put a contact form on your site so you don’t need to expose your actual email address to spammers.

There are plugins that will convert your WordPress web site into a fully functional ecommerce sales site with a built in shopping cart, payment processing, and product delivery.

There are plugins that you can use to turn your WordPress site into a full fledged membership site, with comprehensive member management, your choice of one-time or recurring payment processing, and member content management.

I currently use a plugin called YourMember to handle the membership management on one of my web sites. I have been pleased with the way it works, and impressed with the support I have received from the two guys that developed it.

Digital Access Pass, or DAP, is a membership site management component that just recently appeared on the market. It can drip feed your content to members of your site, which means your new members cannot access all of the content that your old members have access to unless and until they remain a member and have the content drip fed out to them each month. This is a feature that I have long wanted in membership site management tools.

So, all things considered, WordPress is a web site builders dream come true. It’s fast, easy, free, and works like a charm. Where else can you beat a combination like that?

Check out the short video on How To Install WordPress Using cPanel And Fantastico to find out for yourself just how easy it is to install WordPress and have an instant web site, ready to customize to fit your needs.
How To Install WordPress Using cPanel And Fantastico