The last two years I’ve had a lot of people ask me about which premium WordPress themes are the best choice for their projects and exactly how easy they are to learn and use. These questions are usually subjective based on a person’s knowledge, skill set, what they’ve heard from others, or what their desired outcome is supposed to be. Giving a first place award for “Best in Show” to a premium WP theme company is extremely difficult because of these variables. Regardless, I am going to conduct a little experiment.
The Do It Yourself (DYI) group is a huge market. There are many of us who would rather dig in and learn how to use or customize premium WP themes ourselves in addition to a group of us who will use these products to build a business for clients. My experiment is going to be based on these groups and I am going to look at how well the themes stack up in the following areas:
- Ease of use for a beginner to intermediate user
- Documentation or How to Videos
- Support for the theme
- Visual and graphical appearance “out of the box”
- Level of customization or CSS knowledge required to change base design
- User-friendliness for designers, developers, or neither
My end goal is to provide an accurate review and grade for each theme I test, based on how well an entry-level to intermediate level person might use that product to build a site and make money with that product. The following premium themes or frameworks are what I consider the industry leaders and ones I would like to use for this experiment.
Themes or frameworks I currently have:
Themes or frameworks I would like to take for a test drive:
I am hopeful that I will be able to test all of these premium themes and start providing individual reviews by August 18th, with a complete report ready September 1st. If you are a theme company that would like to donate or provide your theme for a BETA test experiment please let me know ASAP. I will limit the entries to eight (8) companies and will cut off any new entries August 11, 2010.
Finally, I will say that all reviews will be completely objective and not based on my involvement with Startbox or my previous employment with iThemes. Just in case you were wondering.
