April 21, 2008

Having now tried out a few of the iThemes premium themes I am noticing a trend develop in the themes. As you might expect there is consistency in the way the themes work and in the way they can be modified and so I have decided to review the remaining themes in just one post.

Developing themes to a consistent feature set is a great idea. It means that when ideas are put forward for inclusion it is easier for all the themes to be updated.

A number of the themes feature home page images that need to be manually replaced by uploaded an image to the server. I have no problem with this, but the consistent feature set means that should they decide to automate this in some way, or if you have bought more than one theme and want to update them yourself, the task will be that much easier.

The themes I am trying out in this post are the Biz Card Theme, Corporate Theme, Deep Order Theme and the Grunge Theme. As with the other themes it isn’t the appearance that interests me, but the features.

All of the themes features except the Biz Card theme include an image uploader which allows you to upload and crop to size a replacement for the themes header image. This is a nice addition but I’m not sure if it is entirely necessary.

With other images the theme uses, such as the featured image I mentioned above, you are expected to replace the image in the theme folder. As I’ve said, I don’t see this as a problem; however, the header images usually require a little work to make it fit the theme and I wonder what triggered the idea that a straight-out-of-photoshop (or GIMP) image would require cropping as part of the upload process.

The Corporate and Grunge themes both include a Photoshop file which makes altering the header a fairly straightforward solution. The Font used for the Grunge theme header itself is readily available for free download so you shouldn’t have any problems altering it to your own title.

The Biz Card theme doesn’t have a header image as such, so the uploader is not necessary. Instead it includes a series of 5 images, which you would need to replace with your own, which change at each page load.

The Biz Card and Grunge Themes both have an admin page for your contact information so you can update this without editing any HTML directly.

One of the mistakes I made with another iThemes theme was to start hacking before looking at the available page templates. Having realised their power, I think page templates are one of the best and easiest ways of offering additional functionality within a theme. With the exception of the Deep Order theme these templates all come with a blog index page template which can be used to add your blog index, showing excerpts from the last five posts, to the main menu. The Corporate theme also includes a page template to replace the home page, which by default features blog posts, with a page, while keeping the same sidebar content.

Overall I think these themes are well put together, easy to change, and a nice starting point. There are lots of things that I would change if they were my themes, but of course that would defeat the purpose of a ready made theme. The point is to make it simple enough to be a starting point for whatever you want to use them for, and I think they are great for this.

Are they worth the money? Well that is something for you to decide yourself, but the cost of even the most expensive themes is only a few hours wages for a good designer, so buying one of these themes is likely to compare favourably with the time it would take to build your own from scratch.

If your looking for a theme that you can make your own without a great deal of modification, then these fit the bill. There are also video tutorials and support forums that could prove invaluable if your not that familiar with WordPress.

You can find out more about the iThemes Premium WordPress Themes at iThemes.com

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