Mayur Jobanputra

www.revolutiontheme.com

Revolution is one of the first sites I looked at.  Good offerings and reasonable prices.  The have products tailored to different industries like sports, news, etc.

Pros: Active forums, most themes have features sections
Cons: Most of the themes are boxy, and look similar but I imagine you can change to fit.   Making themes for specific niches pigeon-hole’s their offerings somewhat.

www.woothemes.com

A wide variety much more likely to suit many tastes and concepts.  The Vibrantcms theme in particular has a home page carousel which I was looking for.

Pros: Proudfolio and VibrantCMS are very polished.
Cons: Limited selection.  They are trying to sell “club” pricing but they don’t have enough themes to make it worthwhile.  Also concerned about how flexible the themes are. Not clear on what plugins if any are required either and I have to register to see the forums which isn’t cool cause I can’t get a sense of what the community is like.

www.wpremix.com

Having over 50 page templates you can choose from caught my eye.  I suppose that means I can setup layouts for individual pages easily?  A video of this in action would be nice (I’m not a WP pro quite yet)

Pros: Page templates, dynamic codes in content, some menu thingmabob, free upgrades,
Cons: I was totally convinced until I saw the sites in the showcase.  Some were laughable.  Seems that you have to download their core product and restyle to your needs.  Ugh.. thats just more work I don’t need.

www.premiumthemes.net

No-nonsense and easy on the eyes, but also not terribly revolutionary. I include them cause they have some potential to compete with my other links here.  Visit them in 6 months.

Pros: inexpensive, well documented feature set.
Cons: Nothing revolutionary.  Only a handful of themes are a step above the free market, sparse forums have me concerned.

www.press75.com

Beautiful work and totally unique.  Themes here are centered around video and are very well done.  Superb work.  If a client comes to me for a video blog, I will use one of these for sure.

Pros: Unique solution tailored for video sites, cheap, no-nonsense sales site
Cons: Wish Jason had more and not just for videos!  I would buy if it fit my needs!

www.prothemedesign.com

Only one theme here right now called Mimbo Pro but its based on the free Mimbo which Darren still gives away.  This may be a candidate for purchase as they said “no more image cropping”.  Thats a huge plus.

Pros: based on a free theme that received a lot of downloads so its definitely been around for a while.
Cons: Posts about modifying the original product should go back into the core product.  Seems you have to modify the core product yourself for things like carousel and custom skins.  Ugh.  More work.

www.wpdesigner.com

Smart business model.  Simple $5 a year for everything, well for the dozen or so published themes. Can’t beat that.

Pros: cheap, lots of members
Cons: Seems the original founder has sold operations so the future of the service is unknown.

www.elegantwordpressthemes.com

Just found this one recently.  They have some great templates and you can’t beat the price - $20 a year for everything. 

www.pearsonified.com

What a pleasant surprise it was to find Chris Pearson today!  Definitely an experienced blogger and someone I would love to learn from.  The themes, however, are not stellar.  The thesis theme is the only one I “might” pay for but I have some issues with some strange link schemes for pages, and 6 input areas for alt tags for I assume 6 rotating images.

Pros: An experienced blogger and potentially an excellent SEO friendly theme.
Cons: Price, rigid structure, link issues, weird category requirements, only one analytics program supported, some mysterious seo strategy called “just add links”, tries to sell the idea that using this template means your SEO problems are over.  That last feature alone scares me… did I mention price?

www.themeterminal.com

They have 2 themes. One, the Tellurian theme, is geared toward a membership site with protected areas, permissions, and fairly soon a bbpress accompanying theme.  The other is their first theme, called Uncomplicated and some admin controlled properties like sidebar location and basic styling.  Prices start at $65 for a single site license, to $110 for a developer license that also comes with PSD’s and additional configuration files.
’

www.blackmastertheme.com

There is only one theme here but it has some interesting Javascript effects and tabs.  Not sure about the design overall – if it was more attractive with a header image, multiple colors palettes, web2’ish fonts, etc I think he could sell more.  Actually saying, not even sure how many have sold but its worth taking a look at.  Single-site license starts at ~58

www.templatemonster.com (honorary mention)

I have used TM in the past quite a few times and I can assure you that the work is very good for their web site templates from their top designers like.   However, the Wordpress blog themes are more suitable for vanilla Wordpress installs and in nearly all cases, those templates fail to put design work in the sidebars and navigation. Don’t expect high-end features like unique home pages, page templates, carousel’s, dynamic menus, etc.  I wouldn’t be surprised if these are just like free templates but with better page design.  I have only included templatemonster as an honorary mention but I would say exhaust the possibilities at my other links before you decided on TM.

Pros: nearly 600 templates and counting.  Lots and lots of variety.
Cons: you probably have to do a lot more work on these to turn them into premium class wordpress installations