Tagged : Premium Wordpress Themes

Since my original review on WooThemes’ Canvas premium WordPress theme, much has changed on this very versatile template.

First of all, some of bugs and quirks that existed in the first version of Canvas have been ironed out, which is a testament to the Woo team as they do actually stand behind and continue to improve their product offering. Even their WooThemes back end dashboard, known as Woo Framework, continues to improve and allow for easy customization.

As the name implies, the Canvas theme is really like starting from scratch. It provides you the basic architecture and flexibility to choose roughly how you want your WordPress website to look, and leaves you to color in the details. To begin with, Canvas offers several basic layout options: Tumblog, a pretty straightforward rolling blog format; Magazine, basically a spiffy front page with feature slider and two column post headers below; and Business, which offers a completely non-blog looking front page great for showing off your business services in a professional way, while maintaining the functionality of a WordPress blog. Continue Reading

WordPress is the ideal platform for food blogging and there are certainly no shortage of themes out there. While you can go with a free theme template, my personal experience is that you get what you pay for, and there are a few players in the WordPress Premium Themes arena that are doing an excellent job — one of which is WooThemes.

When WooThemes released the Delicious Magazine theme for WordPress I was pretty excited. Finally a foodie specific WordPress theme! The look is clean and magazine theme like and offers up a featured posts area at the top and a customizable spotlight area immediately below.

I like the WooThemes engine/control panel that runs their themes and this to me is the mark of a good theme maker. For this reason I tend to stick to some of the larger WordPress template makers because they have spent the time to develop the back end user interface and customization.

After using the Delicious theme I found that it mostly does what I want it to do as far as my foodie blogging is concerned and it allows me to publish a slick looking blog with little effort. There were a couple of areas, particularly the homepage section titles that required a little bit of code fiddling, but it was not a major concern. If you want to do this hopefully you have a friend that can do some basic HTML code adjustments.

The other negative is that the sidebar is slightly smaller than a typical Google 300×250 square ad. This too can be adjusted with a bit of fiddling, but be forewarned that the sidebar does not accomodate that size ad perfectly.

Minus a couple of small faults I think the Delicious theme by WooThemes is probably one of the best food blog templates going. Definitely worth the price. I personally run enough blogs and tinker in WordPress enough that the subscription that WooThemes offers is well worth it, but otherwise expect to spend about $70.

You can buy the Delicious Theme or check out a live demo here.

The WooThemes Inspire theme is a great WordPress theme for a product website or a corporate website. As always the WooThemes crew has created an easily customizable theme with a healthy range of options.

A feature slider on the front page allows you to create custom slider content including images and video content. There is also a fully customizable navigation menu that allows for both category and page based navigation. You can also add custom URLs to the navigation bar.

Several other WooThemes widgets are also available including secondary homepage features and customizable homepage widgets.

Basically this is a premium WordPress template that you can use to get a business website up and running almost instantly. The key advantage that the Inspire theme offers over many other themes is that it allows you to build a professional looking site on the WordPress platform that doesn’t necessarily look like a blog. The blog feature is still there, but the homepage looks like any other non-Wordpress site.

I’m currently using the Inspire theme on my company’s website to good success. If you’re looking for an easy to implement and update WordPress based corporate site I’d totally recommend the Inspire theme. WooThemes is one of the best premium WordPress theme designers on the web and offers a wide range of theme types for different business types.

Wordpress is without a doubt in my mind the leading content management system on the internet. It’s free, it’s super easy to use, and customization is also a breeze thanks to an extensive community of custom premium WordPress theme designers.

I have sampled and tested a large number of premium WordPress themes for a wide range of purposes and have settled on WooThemes as my kind of “go to” premium theme provider.

Themes can be purchased on their own as singles for a low price, but their subscription program allows me to experiment with different website ideas without having to purchase individual themes at a relatively low cost, and they continuously develop and release new themes. For a one time fee + an ongoing monthly subscription fee, WooThemes allows you full access to new themes as they become available and any previously existing themes as well. The subscription is ideal for those running multiple websites.

The beauty of using WooThemes is that they make templates that are easy to customize and fit a wide range of websites or blog types like travel, retail, small business, photography, video sharing, wine, etc. The WooThemes customization interface consists of the ability to adjust layout and page template types as well as have custom colours, fonts, and custom navigation. WooThemes templates are also advertising ready if you plan on hosting internal ads, or AdSense ads, or ads from another provider. When you switch from one WooTheme to another, most of your changes will carry-over, which can be an issue when changing between custom templates from different providers.

WordPress is no longer just a blogging tool. It can be used for so much more and I have helped and friends and clients implement websites using WordPress for their retail businesses, product sites, and many other things. I have basically switched all of my own websites to WordPress even though I am well capable of building my own site.

It’s simply the most powerful and effective tool to get the job done and with a premium WordPress theme, it’s less expensive than ever. A good place to start is to buy a premium theme and customize the inside elements using Photoshop and Illustrator and work from there.

I’d recommend WooThemes for anyone looking to build a blog or a company website that wants to be in control of their own content and doesn’t have a high level of expertise in web design. The WooThemes templates are basically ready to go and need minor customization. More advanced users may want to try a framework like Thesis, but if you’re looking to get it done quickly and effectively with little fuss, than go WooThemes. Besides, if you opt for the subscription, you can always change your theme later down the road. A few hundred dollars a year is much cheaper than the several thousand it can cost to produce even a basic website.

Check out some WooThemes examples below.