Evolution is a new WordPress theme coming soon from Elegant Themes. 

This will be the first fully responsive theme design form Elegant themes, meaning it was designed to automatically resize on virtually any device, including desktop computers, iPhones and Android phones, as well as iPads and other tablets. 

The design is simple and elegant, and should prove useful for a wide variety of websites.

[...]

We’ve been working hard to release some great updates to Themespotter.

You can now sort WordPress business themes by category, theme designer/developers, release date, theme style and popular features, as well as searching by text within any category or feature (or combination of categories).

Additionally, we scaled back and combined the amount of theme categories, which should make searching even faster and easier. With the flexible nature of website templates, many themes can be used for various purposes, so it makes sense that certain themes are included in more than one category. In some cases though, themes were nearly always being listed in the same 2 categories. In cases like that, we just combined the 2 categories into 1. We also eliminated a couple categories that were very specific and have very few WordPress themes designed for them, and moved the themes into other appropriate categories.

Lastly, the site’s text search has been greatly improved to show much more accurate results.

-Dustin

I’m trilled to note that Themespotter was recently featured on KillerStartups.com!

KillerStartups.com is a user driven internet startups community. Entrepreneurs, investors, and bloggers are staying informed on up-and-coming internet startups using their blog platform, where internet entrepreneurs submit their startup to see what others think about it.

Check out the write-up HERE!

There likely won’t be any new WordPress themes added to the site for the next few days, as I am working on adding some great new searching and sorting features to Themespotter. This involves adding information to all the existing themes on the site, as well as some other site changes. It’s quite a time-consuming process, but I think it will be well worth it.

A question for you: What are some of the most important features you look for in a WordPress theme?

Soon, finding the best WordPress theme for your business will be even easier. Stay tuned.

-Dustin

I have started adding WordPress business themes from Themeforest and and Karma Themes to Themespotter.

Themeforest is a website template marketplace where independent theme developers can sell their themes.  In addition to WordPress themes, Themeforest sells themes for a variety of platforms, including Joomla, Shopify, OScommerce, Magento, and a variety of others. Themeforest has literally thousands of website templates, and well over a thousand just for WordPress. While I won’t be featuring all of the WordPress themes listed on Themeforest on this site, my goal is to dig through Themeforest and find their best WordPress themes for business and feature them on here.

Karma Themes is a new WordPress theme developer that has a strong focus on quality and service. While Karma Themes only has around 6 or so WordPress themes at this time, they obviously took their time with each of them, as they are all very well designed. Their themes are designed to be very easy to setup and use. Features like extended Theme Options, Short- codes, custom menus, sample content, backgrounds and widgetized areas can be used without a single line of code on all their themes. Karma Themes offers a WordPress theme membership program where you get access to all their current themes, as well as all new themes for $75 a year (uou may keep using all downloaded files even if you don’t renew your membership after the first year). Karma Themes is also focused on providing outstanding technical support, which is obviously something I look for in theme designers.

Cheers,

Dustin

In addition to working on WordPress theme reviews, and adding themes from new theme designers to the site, I’ve been working on making some small improvements to the site.

Some of the recent changes to this site include:

-Breadcrumb Navigation on all theme review pages (as well as a different category-based permalink structure), which, put simply, will hopefully will make it easier to navigate back to previous pages your were on.

-Live Search. I used the WordPress Instant Search Plugin designed by iDesignEco for this. I played around with several different live search plugins (many of which try to do too much) before deciding on this one. The catch with it is it makes search suggestions based on previously searched words on the site (as opposed to nearly any word in the dictionary as some other plugins do), so it will take some time for it to build up its list of search suggestions.

-New default theme sorting. Previously, the Themespotter homepage listed the most recently added WordPress themes, and category pages were set to display the most recently reviewed themes chronologically. While the homepage will continue to display new WordPress themes (basically blog-style), the results under each category will display themes in order of our ranking, with the highest ranked themes on top. Search results will display in the same way; so if you search for ‘WordPress eCommerce themes’, the top ranked themes will display first. The logic behind this is people tend to look for the best WordPress themes (and more specifically, the best WordPress business themes), rather than searching for all available themes, for example. Being that our ranking is obviously arbitrary, and people can easily have different opinions, we still want to feature as many WordPress business themes as possible on this site.

-Switched to using the AddThis WordPress social network sharing plugin, as well as a seperate Google + sharing button.

As always, other suggestions are always more than welcome.

Cheers,

Dustin

Premium Press was started by Mark Fail in 2010, and quickly developed a reputation for designing some of the best WordPress themes for business, and their themes are now featured on Themespotter.

One thing I like a lot about Premium Press is that Mark is focused on a select number of WordPress themes (he currently has 6 themes, plus child themes), which he updates and improves over time. Several themes are in their 6th incarnation, showing that Premium Press is committed to improving their themes, and keeping them up to date (rather than just designing themes and then moving on to others). Premium Press is currently a 5-person team consisting of Mark and 4 people devoted to customer service and theme testing.

All Premium Press themes include lifetime support and updates, and can be used on as many websites as you wish, all with a standard license. Their themes are very affordably priced and are a great value for what you get. Premium Press also provides extensive theme documentation and video tutorials on their website, as well as having a community forum, making it easy for anyone to get started with their themes.

Premium Press also has a few new WordPress Business themes in the works, including a Price Comparison Theme and a Client & Employee Management Theme, as well as a Membership Website WordPress Plugin.

You can check out my reviews of Premium Press themes here.

Dustin

I’ve been waiting for a good Daily Deal theme for WordPress for a while, and Templatic currently has one in the works! Daily Deal websites are becoming very popular, with large sites like Groupon, Living Social, Woot and others leading the way, but this area is really just getting started, and there is still plenty of room for entrepreneurs to start new Daily Deal businesses focusing on specific niches or in local areas.

There really aren’t any great WordPress deal-of-the-day themes out there yet, so I’m real excited to see what Templatic has come up with (and hope other WordPress designers will follow suite with their own WordPress Daily Deals theme as well).

Here is a good recent article from the Wall Street Journal discussing daily deal sites), and here is a screen shot of this upcoming WordPress theme:

RichWP was founded by Felix Krusch in Montreal, Canada as a as a consumer centric and easily approachable Premium WordPress Theme Label. Felix takes pride in providing outstanding service and technical support, and his goal with RichWP was to build (in his own words) “a company that listens to you, answers your questions, solves your problems, and participates in the conversation”.

I can vouch for the high level of support RichWP provides, as the Themespotter site was built using the Rich WP WordPress theme framework and a RichWP child theme.

RichWP offers a great WordPress framework and several very high quality child themes. One thing I like about RichWP is that while some other WordPress theme developers build a framework and then churn out tons of child themes just for the sake of offering a lot of themes (many of which might have been thrown together quickly and are not very good), Felix clearly carefully designs the child themes he does offer.

In addition to over 20 design presets that are included with the Rich WP Framework, RichWP currently offers 7 child themes, all of which are very good. Most of the RichWP child themes were designed for businesses, which fits right into to the focus of this site being on the WordPress business themes.

You can visit RichWP’s website at richwp.com, or check out all our RichWP WordPress theme reviews here (more reviews will be posted in the coming days).

-Dustin

Several great WordPress themes developed by Bizz Themes are now featured on Themespotter.

One of the many great things about WordPress is its worldwide appeal and community. BizzThemes is run by Željan Topić from Slovania. In addition to developing WordPress themes, Zeljan runs a WordPress blog at bizzartic.com, and also offers WordPress customization services.

If the name ‘BizzThemes’ isn’t self-explanatory enough, he focuses on WordPress themes for businesses and pro-bloggers, which its right in with the focus of Themespotter. I’ve reviewed several of his themes over the last week and will have some more posted in the coming days. As always, I try to keep my WordPress theme reviews simple to understand and short enough so they (hopefully) don’t get boring and redundant.

Themes designed by BizzThemes all include Advanced Theme Options, Complete SEO Options and Great Support.

’till next time,

Dustin

I made a few notable changes to the Themespotter site this morning.

• The Designer and Price of each theme is now displayed on the right of the WordPress theme image on each details page, along with a button to view a live demo and a button to purchase the theme. I decided to separate this info out from the theme description to make it easier to find, and I think it’s best to make sure this info is always ‘above the fold’.

• Enabled ‘Infinity Scrolling’. What that fancy name means is that as you scroll down on category page listings (as well as on the home page), it will continue to load more theme posts. This is as opposed to having standard pagination (ie, listing Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Next Page) on the bottom of each category page.

I’m interested in hearing any feedback on these changes. Also, I’m curious if people would find a table listing the top ranked WordPress themes added to the top of each category page. There is currently a widget on the right sidebar displaying this info, but an additional table could display the ‘Top 5 WordPress eCommerce Themes’ in order of rating, for example.

As always, any other feedback is more than welcome at any time!

Cheers, Dustin

Templatic is running a promotion on their WordPress theme club this week. Their theme club is a great deal for anyone running multiple WordPress themes for business. Their theme club is normally $299, but is being offered for only $199 this week only. The theme club gives you unlimited access to all 60+ of their WordPress business themes.

One important thing to point out is that there is still a $15 monthly fee for their club, but you can cancel your membership and still use the themes (the monthly membership covers future theme updates and unlimited technical support).

You can get the WordPress theme club discount here.

I’ve been a fan of Templatic’s WordPress business themes for a while, and it looks like they have some nice looking themes in the works.

Outside of the popular Buddy Press, there aren’t really very many options for people looking to develop their own social networking website in WordPress.

Templatic’s ‘Plus One’ Theme (named after Google’s new +1 feature) will allow visitors to vote on posts they like, without integrating with Facebook (for better or worse).  You can also let your visitors submit an article and keep track of their favorite posts. Will anyone consider purchasing this theme, or is it too much of a Facebook/Google knockoff?

In addition to a WordPress Hotel Booking theme, an Appointment Booking Theme and a WordPress Spa Theme, Templatic also announced that they have several new WordPress eCommerce Themes in the works, including the Storebox Theme (pictured below).

The potential of the StoreBox theme interests me a lot more than Plus One and the other themes they announced. WordPress has so much potential as a fully-functional eCommerce platform, but WordPress theme developers haven’t really been able to come up with a theme as robust as some of the dedicated eCommerce software options out there like Volusion and 3dCart yet. Integration into the WordPress admin is pretty ‘clunky’ on some of the WordPress shopping themes currently available. I know there are a lot of small businesses out there tired of paying over $100 a month for hosted shopping cart software, so I’d love to see WordPress become a more viable option for online stores (especially stores that carry large amounts of inventory, which can be tricky to manage with some of the current themes available).

What features do you want to see in StoreBox and future WordPress commerce and shopping themes?

Welcome to Themespotter, a new WordPress theme marketplace and review site with a focus on WordPress business themes. The site is just getting going, but my goal is to give you honest reviews of WordPress themes, and an easy way to demo and purchase them. It will take some time to get all the great business themes added to the site, but new themes will be reviewed and added daily.

A few new WordPress theme reviews were added today, including Templatic’s WordPress Storefront Theme and the WordPress Events Theme.

Feel free to take off your shoes and dig around the site. I’d love to hear your feedback.

-Dustin

I’ve started to add WordPress theme reviews from themes designed by PageLines, in addition to their popular Platform Pro WordPress Framework to Themespotter.  While the Platform Pro Framework is currently PageLines’ biggest focus, they have a few individual premium WordPress themes available, all of which are very nicely designed.

PageLines is the work of Andrew Powers and Adam Munns, and they describe PageLines as a design & development company with a passion for making people happy, and focus on helping people make the most for their business through smarter implementation and great design on the web.

-Dustin