December 24th, 2010

WordPress Discussions

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Tags: commercial, market, themes

Responses

Comments

Charles Neville (1 comments.) says:

12/24/2010 at 3:09 pm

Headway have already diversified their product offering
with the addition of a marketplace for paid-for add-ons and child
themes. As a user of Headway I’m pleased that the majority of
effort goes into supporting and developing a single theme. I’ve
bought themes from another company that creates and sells lots of
very visually attractive themes, but there are fundamental bugs and
bad coding decisions (you HAVE to have at least 5 featured
posts/pages, if you only have 3, then you get two blank panels in
the slider!) littered through their themes, which due to the way
the theme is built, any upgrade of the theme that doesn’t contain a
fix that I’ve already applied myself means further work.
- Grant Griffiths (1 comments.) says:
  
  12/24/2010 at 5:43 pm
  
  Charles – Thanks for your kind words. While our focus will remain on the continued innovation with the core Headway theme/framework. We will be bringing more child themes into the picture. Both from the crew and from Headway developers who are excited by the opportunities of building and selling Headway child themes.
  
  In addition, due to numerous request, we will be throwing into the mix Headway specific training. We are very excited about this and look forward to the added interaction this will bring between the Headway crew and the Headway user community.
  
  We also are working on a couple of other offerings which we will tell everyone more about sometime after the first of the year.
Matt (27 comments.) says:

12/24/2010 at 9:09 pm

This year what excited me most in the theme space was that everyone got on the GPL bus. I think now that we have that whole argument behind us, we’ll start to see more amazing innovation and businesses built in the space.

I was also happy that the free theme options continued to kick butt as well, often from the paid providers. On WP.com the theme team launched 29 new themes this year, all of them pretty slick.

I think I said 2010 would be the year of the theme, and it was, but I think 2011 is going to be another year of the theme.
Destination Infinity (7 comments.) says:

12/24/2010 at 10:12 pm

I think ‘Premium Themes’ are quite different from paid themes. Once, I purchased a premium theme of a nice free theme I was using, and trust me, the free version was far better (for that application). But I found another application for the premium theme later on…. So, I guess free themes are not bad at all and they are unique in themselves. One example I could give you is the Twenty Ten which I am using for my personal blog – Its awesome!!

Destination Infinity
Brian L. (2 comments.) says:

12/24/2010 at 10:16 pm

Probably the community should start to term premium themes as paid or commercial themes since we can find quite a number of professional (or premium-like) themes that are offered free.

Even though the competition is stiff in the paid theme market, I think it will prosper when more and more people are opting for total theme solutions which include support and customization.
Hissing Kitty (9 comments.) says:

12/25/2010 at 2:40 pm

Still to many quality free themse out on market, still demand for industrial strength CMS continues to grow and these mask what is otherwise another typical WPB.
Tom Coburn (67 comments.) says:

12/26/2010 at 1:00 am

I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with paying for a theme, but just like plugins, some authors are more reliable then others. There are some themes or plugins I would never pay money for, because the author is unreliable about providing enough documentation on the plugin or theme itself. Everybody in the entire WP community already knows plugins go in wp-contents/plugins directory, and themes go in wp-contents/themes directory, why thats the only documentation most plugin or theme authors provide I have no clue! Any special instructions other then that most of them just expect you to read their minds, like the disqus or facebook plugins for instance I would never pay money for those plugins, or some themes authors haven’t worked on since the 2.1 days, why would I want to pay money to an author who no longer exists? so I guess IMHO it depends entirely on how reliable the author is at providing enough documentation and support for their themes, to me that would be the single deciding factor rather I pay for a theme or plugin or not. I think theme authors are like plugin authors, so many some good some bad.
personalized gifts (1 comments.) says:

12/26/2010 at 9:11 am

If only every commercial theme author could create a stellar product every time! The problem is that not every author will achieve this and those who don’t will have to make do with hedging their bets on a number of less stellar products instead. Hence the proliferation.
Robert (1 comments.) says:

12/26/2010 at 9:27 am

As a self declared oldster that has no more interest in how WordPress works under the hood than how to do open heart surgery here’s my take on the whole to pay or not to pay (and yes lots of it agrees with people that have already commented).
If I’m going to pay for it there must be something special that I can not get from a free alternative. But, yes I do donate to authors of free products because if they are useful I want the authors to keep going. It also has to be relevant to the current version of WP and I accept the commercial risk that the business may not exist in the future. I may just have to be flexible and look for a replacement solution. The whole WP phenomenon is big enough to suggest there will always be alternatives.
Premium = marketing term. No surprises there. WWW has become the place to find master of the hyperbole. Clarity and simplicity are undervalued
virtues. So for the New Year let us all try to use names that are simple and descriptive. For me “commercial” or better “paid for” says evrything i need to know. If it’s good and useful I’ll pay, no problems.
Vlad (Small Business Blog) (8 comments.) says:

12/26/2010 at 9:22 pm

This comes just in time for me to reconsider releasing some of our themes we’ve been sitting on for some time. It looks like one is getting more problems than it is worth when releasing premium themes, unless you’re happy with $5/hour pay.
James Dalman (1 comments.) says:

12/27/2010 at 9:55 am

Jeff,

Thanks for your thoughts and insight. I think it was extremely beneficial. I did respond to my original post that I hope will clarify a few things up – including terminology.