Word­Press has become a hugely pop­u­lar open source blog­ging and pub­lish­ing plat­form. The abun­dance of free themes and plu­g­ins as well as its ease-​​of-​​use have con­tributed to the attrac­tion and pop­u­lar­ity for using Word­Press. While there are some great free themes for Word­Press, many only offer basic func­tion­al­ity and sim­plis­tic designs.

Since late 2007 how­ever an increas­ing num­ber of Word­Press theme devel­op­ers have been offer­ing pre­mium Word­Press themes – themes which are offered for a fixed price. These pre­mium Word­Press themes are usu­ally sold for between $50 to $250. Orig­i­nally only a small num­ber of tal­ented and well-​​known Word­Press theme design­ers cre­ated paid pre­mium Word­Press themes which were well designed, highly func­tional, top-​​quality themes that trans­formed a Word­Press instal­la­tion from a sim­ple blog into a pow­er­ful con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. How­ever as the pre­mium Word­Press theme busi­ness con­cept spread, more and more Word­Press theme design­ers have hopped on the band­wagon try­ing to cash on the new trend fill­ing up their port­fo­lio with pre­mium (paid) word­press themes.

How­ever with greater vari­ety and num­bers of paid pre­mium Word­Press themes also comes vary­ing lev­els of qual­ity. So what specif­i­cally makes a pre­mium Word­Press theme pre­mium? Some char­ac­ter­is­tics that should set a pre­mium word­press theme apart from a free theme are listed below:

Qual­ity and Unique Design
Pre­mium Word­Press themes should be just that — Pre­mium. They should look bet­ter and be of a much higher qual­ity and unique design than com­pared to those avail­able for free.

Fea­tures
While all themes are dif­fer­ent, in gen­eral pre­mium Word­Press themes should have more “Fea­tures” than their free coun­ter­parts. What that means depends on the theme in ques­tion. How­ever some fea­tures may include: “Fea­tured Posts” areas, Mul­ti­ple lay­out options for the home page, drop down menus, mul­ti­ple cus­toms tem­plates for pages, cus­tom field options, print style sheets etc.

Cus­tomiza­tion Options and Fex­i­bil­ity
Peo­ple want options, so Pre­mium Word­Press themes should be cus­tomis­able. Buy­ing a pre­mium theme will set you apart from the crowd sig­nif­i­cantly, but since other peo­ple will still be using the same theme, pre­mium themes should be able to be eas­ily cus­tomized fur­ther, whether it be for the lay­out, colours, images, or all of the above.

Live Pre­view or Demo
There should be a live demo or pre­view of the theme so you can test it and check it out before buy­ing. If there is no live pre­view or demo that should be a warn­ing sign. You should ask why don’t they want you to test the theme first? All rep­utable pre­mium theme sell­ers will have a live demo full of con­tent for you to test. Explore the live demo thor­oughly, test­ing all pages to see that the theme works prop­erly and there are no errors or mistakes.

Full Sup­port
If you’re buy­ing a pre­mium Word­Press theme it should also come with a cer­tain degree of sup­port from the designer. The level of sup­port can vary how­ever and will range from per­son­alised indi­vid­ual sup­port from the designer, to the pro­vi­sion of forums or blog com­ment sec­tions for ask­ing ques­tions and obtain­ing sup­port from the designer and other peo­ple who have pur­chased the theme.

Sup­port­ing Doc­u­men­ta­tion
Pre­mium Word­Press themes should come with an instruc­tion man­ual or doc­u­ment. This should explain how to upload and install the theme and how to man­age any of the options that are built into the theme.

Free Updates
Word­Press is con­tin­u­ally being updated and improved and a pre­mium Word­Press theme devel­oper should be offer­ing you free updates of the theme when required.

Well Coded and Error Free
There should be no cod­ing errors, mis­spellings, X images, etc in a pre­mium Word­Press theme. The theme has cross browser com­pat­i­ble and been tested to work prop­erly on all the major browsers, plus the theme should have clean and valid code and adhere to strict XHTML and CSS standards.

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3. Revive Your Blog With Cus­tom Word­Press Themes!
4. Word­Press PPC Theme: Cre­ate Saleslet­ters, Cpa, PPC Land­ing Pages.
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