As someone who has hundreds niche sites in my portfolio, I’m always on the lookout for the best wordpress themes to make my sites standout. While I do sometimes use free Wordpress themes, I’ve found several premium Wordpress themes that are worthy of investing in. Mainly because they look great, are easy to customize, and flexible enough to work with any niche. Below are four of the best premium wordpress themes I’ve tried.
#1 – Thesis Theme
This is probably the most popular premium Wordpress theme, and I am using it on this very blog. Thesis Theme has a very clean look out of the box, but it’s really powerful enough to work in any situation. Whether you want to create a blog, sales page, squeeze page, magazine layout, or whatever, you can do it with Thesis. I really love the ability to change the number of columns (1, 2, 3) and set the columns widths on the fly. I also like the fact that it is SEO ready out of the box, so there is no need to install additional plugins. When installed, you have complete control over the titles of each post, plus other meta data which is very important for getting your site seen and indexed by the search engines. Fonts, colors can be adjusted for the various elements as well. For additional power, make use of the many Thesis hooks to do some really cool things. One thing you can’t overlook is the massive Thesis user community which you need to take advantage of to get the most out of the theme.
Price: $164 Developer Option, $87 Personal Option
#2 – FlexSqueeze Theme
If you ever search for internet marketing product reviews, you’ll notice that many marketers are using FlexSqueeze as their Wordpress theme of choice. FlexSqueeze is based off the free Flexibility Wordpress theme, and what makes the theme so flexible is that it can be used as a blog or sales page. Or if you want both, you can integrate a sales page directly into your blog. It comes with a number of sales and squeeze page templates that look really nice and it’s perfect for those of us who can’t design a lick. One thing I really appreciate about FlexSqueeze is how easy it is to integrate your opt-in box directly into the theme.
Price: $127
#3 – Frugal Theme
An alternative to Thesis theme is Frugal Theme which is gaining a lot of fans in its own right. Frugal is a super powerful theme that contains a ton of customization options. Some might say the number of options is overwhelming, but once you’ve used it on a couple of sites, you will appreciate the flexibility that it provides you. The included help videos are very useful in this regard as well. The recently released Frugal Theme 3.5 is Wordpress 3.0 compatible and takes advantage of many of its new features. Frugal Theme is also skinnable and there are a lot free and premium Frugal Theme skins to help you customize the look and feel of your site.
Price: $169 Developer Basic, $89 Personal Basic
#4 – Socrates Theme
Socrates Theme is a recently released theme by expert blogger Joel Comm who’s specifically designed this theme for niche bloggers. Those of you whos whole business is creating Adsense or Clickbank product type sites will really want to give Socrates Theme a look. I really like the custom header design system which allows you to painlessly change your site’s header. It comes with over 160 niche header designs and you can probably find a couple of headers that match the niche you are targeting yourself. Backgrounds are easily customizable as well, with over 50 custom backgrounds to choose from. The layout is also quite customizable and you can choose from several different styles. Socrates Theme is one of the most affordable and full featured premium Wordpress themes available.
Price: $77 Unlimited Domains, $47 Single Domain license
What do you guys think? What are some of the best wordpress themes that you have tried? Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments below.
