The insanely affordable Elegant Themes has done it again with another theme release that has left me salivating to find a use for. I’ve always been a huge grunge fan – having lived out some limited dreams of being in a grunge band in high school – and have always admired the unique style (and skill!) that is poored into this type of design.
As mentioned before, Elegant Themes is just ridiculously cheap and has been told on multiple occasions that he could (and should) charge much more for his theme packages. What you get for his $20 annual pass is quite competitive and actually seriously rivaling what you would get spending 12 times that with his competitors. Of course, there is always two ways to sell anything. Sell at a premium price and move fewer units or sell at a low price and go for quantity. But I digress – onto the theme.
Like I was saying, the grunge of this theme is consistent and never lets up regardless of the elements. As you move through the theme, that feeling that everything is exactly where it was meant to be is confirmed over and over again. The repeating background is repeating at just the right spot, the header graphic gives me this urban sophisticated look while being youthful and playful all at the same time.
The graphics look as though they were all hand drawn, scanned in and implemented in a complex yet very cohesive design – and in fact, that is exactly how this theme was designed. The out-of-the-box thinking of this developer is sure to make him stand out from the crowd.
Features List:
Opera compatible
Netscape compatible
Safari compatible
Wordpress 2.9 compatible
Four Color Schemes
Threaded Comments
Optional Blog-style Structure
Gravatar ready
Firefox compatible
IE8 + IE7 + IE6 compatible
Advertisement Ready
Widget ready sidebars
Theme Options Page
Custom thumbnail images
PSD files
Valid XHTML + CSS
Smooth tabless design
Pricing
Unlimited theme membership for only $19.95 per year.
The TooCreative‘ team is building our first ecommerce web site and with that, we’ve been looking at some premium Wordpress themes that are designed to be used for an online store. There are several options out there, and this is the first in a series of posts that discusses them.
The latest design trends include large colors, smooth gradients and solid vector shapes. Retro is in, so long as it isn’t cluttered and the images are optimized correctly (no pixelation folks!). One of Templatic’s newest themes, “Store” illustrates clever use of current design trends in a great example on how dynamic a premium Wordpress theme can be. Please note, Templatic was previously PremiumThemes.net.
When you arrive on the home page, you are clear as to why you are there – you are looking for a product. The “featured” product list is rotated to the right with a quick navigation to the left. Actually, there are two tiers of navigation: Pages navigation and Products navigation. Having these distinguished is important so as to provide easy quick access for your potential shoppers to find your product line without having to sift through terminological interpretation (you like that? I think I just made up a word ).
Another thing I really like is the dynamically updated shopping cart. When you add a new product, the shopping cart is updated without the whole page reloading.
In the back end, this sweet theme supports product import using .csv, payment gateway management (PayPal, Autorize.net, Google Checkout, and WorldPay), order management, e-product built in support, integrated order management area for customers amd so much more.
Feature List (from the theme developer’s site)
Usability – Theme developer studied best practices of building e-commerce websites, studied lots of successful online stores and brainstormed some of the key pages and functionality that may impact the sales process that your customer goes through. They reduced the steps of the process, restructured the purchase experience, debated on the small elements such as button / text / colors / notifications etc., finally concluding their base e-commerce theme to be one of the very easiest to use and best performing purchase experience so far.
Different modes of Shopping Cart – You may sell anything – tangible or intangible.
Shopping Cart – Like the standard shopping cart that you see on other e-commerce websites. You may choose to have “add to cart” mode and let the users add all the items they want and then lead them to checkout or, you can have “buy now” mode and take them straight to checkout when they select a product.
Digital Shop – If you are selling digital product of any kind, this is a perfect option for you. Are you selling icons, digital art, PDF, e-books, scripts or any other kind of digital goodies? Select this option and when a user makes a purchase, they will have an account generated at your site and they can download their purchase any time. You don’t have to worry about third party digital delivery sites.
Catalog mode – Maybe you only want to showcase your items and don’t want to sell it online? Simply choose this mode and you will have “send inquiry” button instead of buy now / add to cart. Visitors thus, can send an inquiry on the products they like.
Manage Products – Add / Edit / Delete products are as easy as you create a wordpress blog post. You have a custom panel where-in you can edit the product description, different parameters, upload product images etc. real easy.
Order Management – Depending upon the settings from your admin panel, you can manage the order – approve, process or cancel / reject an order.
Shipping Options – As an admin, you can choose Free, Flat rate; Weight or Price based shipping option for your store. What’s more you can even set free shipping for particular items in case you’ve set other option for your store.
Multiple Payment Gateways – You have PayPal, Autorize.net, Google Checkout, WorldPay, bank transfer and Cash on Delivery as payment gateway options. Choose the gateway you prefer.
Manage Tax – You may specify overall tax percentage that applies to all your products and, you may choose to leave individual products tax free
Grid view / List view – Whenever you are browsing the product collection, you have an option to see the products in list view or grid view. It’s built-in by default.
User registration – Users may register on your site or, they will be taken to registration page on the checkout procedure. They will have their own user area where they can keep track of their order, manage profile and download purchased digital products.
Bulk Upload ( csv ) – Using another shopping cart solution for your store and want to switch to our store themes? No worries. You can export your data from there in .csv files and import it in your wordpress installation when you use our store themes. (sample .csv file included with the theme)
Coupon codes – Admin can generate coupon codes for occasional sales promotion.
Product Images – Built in multiple product image upload. Uploaded images are auto re-sized to fit various thumbnails required throughout the site. Also the product zoom functionality is built it.
Other parameters – Specifying Tax, weight, color(s), size(s) are easy. Also you may specify different prices for different size/colors just in case.
Specify product size(s), color(s), and other miscellaneous features – You may specify Size chart if applied, When viewing a product Similar Products are automatically displayed, Several additional custom widgets are built in such as customer support, Subscribe, socialize, promo banners etc. that you can use for your store website.
Blog – Of course the themes come with blog, pages etc. functionality with some page templates so you can have a blog for your website.
Pricing
Single License Purchase (one use): $65
Developer License (use this theme all you want): $99:
Annual all theme access to all themes: $279
Holding tightly to the niche of one of the few quality real estate theme developers, Gorilla Themes has released Broker, their latest premium Wordpress theme. One of the defining differences between Gorilla Themes and the other real estate themes available on the market is that these themes have a built in listing input framework in the back end to work with. Putting in real estate listings is as simple as putting in a new post with special custom fields in the post editor that allow you to put in all the details: square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, description, etc.
Another distinguishing difference between these premium Wordpress themes and others is the multi-faceted ways in which you can search through real estate listings. There is a whole control panel page dedicated to organizing your search boxes. Of course all the code is well marked and easy to navigate if you like to get your hands dirty!
Adorned in bright colors and flashy style, Aloha Themes newest design, Showbiz, offers celebrity gossipers a fresh look for 2010 in the Premium Wordpress Theme category.
Featuring two home page layouts, Showbiz will display your most recent content in a magazine style format or traditional blog-style with the posts flowing down the page chronologically. Plus, the navigation is huge separating the page and category navigation with drop downs allowing plenty of room for multiple categories.
With a Twitter box in the sidebar that automatically grabs the tweets from the account you specify in the control panel to the automatic image resizer to the built in ad manager, this theme has it all.
Feature List
Unique, multi-purpose design – easy to customize
Smart navigation – Showcases categories and pages
Home page image slide show with post teaser
Comes with PSD files (optional)
Auto sized images on home page
Twitter Integration
Theme Options page to easily manage your site
Multiple Ad Spaces for banner ads or AdSense
Widget Ready
Tabbed comments and Popular posts in sidebar
Documentation included for easy setup
Pricing
Unlimited Usage No Restriction Price: $77
Multi-use License: Don’t need it, you can use it all you want for $77!!!
Smooth and grungy all at the same time, the Deviant theme just released by Elegant Themes makes quick work of showcasing your blog content. For the price, you can’t afford NOT to be a club member and have access to all their sweet themes.
Feature List
Opera compatible
Netscape compatible
Safari compatible
Wordpress 2.9 compatible
Six Color Schemes
Threaded Comments
Optional Blog-style Structure
Gravatar ready
Firefox compatible
IE8 + IE7 + IE6 compatible
Advertisement Ready
Widget ready sidebars
Theme Options Page
Custom thumbnail images
PSD files
Valid XHTML + CSS
Smooth tabless design
Pricing
Unlimited theme membership for only $19.95 per year.
Brand new to their portfolio, WooThemes‘ latest edition to their growing theme family is Optimize, a premium Wordpress theme packed with super hot new features, and entirely new WooFramework and 22 color styles to boot!
Don’t let the home page of the layout deceive you into thinking it’s just another image rotator. This featured content presenter is dynamic in that it applies the smooth appeal of PrettyPhoto that allows a super modern lightbox effect that works for images AND video. Just browsing the demo, the coolness of this is quite evident.
Just below the featured content area is the “life-streaming” bar that allows your most recent Tweet to be displayed. This is growing more popular and certainly a neat add-on feature.
Below the Twitter box is a place to showcase your site’s content through “mini-features”. Included in the navigation is a separate blog, which allows you to use this premium Wordpress theme to utilize Wordpress as a CMS. The demo site uses it to showcase a portfolio, but you can use it to showcase your company’s work, regardless of what you work on.
Another thing that I really like about this theme is the smooth drop down functionality of the top navigation. The look is clean and complete, unlike other premium themes that have a chopping drop down look. These drop downs have styled backgrounds and fade in and out smoothly with no flash.
Feature List
A custom home page featured area to showcase your work or products, with optional sub-featured area to give them more insight.
Custom home page layout with optional Twitter box, Mini-features area, Info/Quotes box and option to insert any page above/below mini-features area.
Sexy jQuery effects and PrettyPhoto (lightbox) integrated in theme.
An optional integrated portfolio section to show off your work/products.
Custom Woo Widgets for use in the sidebar and in the widgetized footer: Search widget, Ad space widget, Flickr widget.
22 stylish alternate colour schemes to choose from plus custom color picker so you can set your own background color and link color.
Last but not least, the brand new WooFramework2 with updated options panel
Continuing to maintain their clear superiority in the premium theme development world, WooThemes has upped the ante with an improved backend framework that improves efficiency and makes it easier for you to customize your shiny new premium Wordpress WooTheme.
Per the WooBlog:
As we have mentioned in the last week, we’ve been working on a new version (2.0) of the WooFramework, which we’ll be releasing with Optimize tomorrow. The integration of WooFramework 2.0 with Optimize, serves as the public beta of the new framework and we’d like to fix all of the possible bugs first, before we integrate it into all our older themes (all 54 of them).
So all of our subscribers who will get access to Optimize tomorrow, will have the opportunity to play with the new options panel & framework. For the rest, the following preview video will have to do the trick…
I’ve gone through the video (below) and am anxious to dive into working with the framework. I never really like the accordion style set up they had before, but it was easy to get along with because they give you so many customization options to work with. The new layout and functionality is sure to be a huge hit.
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