Disclosure: this whole post is an affiliate marketing post. If that makes you unhappy, please skip it.
Doing affiliate marketing for WordPress themes is nothing new in the social space. After testing out dozens and dozens of different providers, from Thesis to the WordPress Codex, I’ve settled in on Nick Roach’s Elegant Themes and am happy enough with it to recommend his stuff to you. How happy? Well, this site runs on it and has for a while. So does my employer, Blue Sky Factory (we’re both on the Minimal theme, but mine is the uber-lazy out of the box appearance).
Why Elegant Themes when so many other people recommend other providers and very prominent social media folks like my friend Chris Brogan recommend something completely different? Simple: I have different needs. For a lot of folks, they want the power and customization that comes with the various theme frameworks. They want to be able to make it dance precisely to their tune, look and feel like something completely and totally unique. They spend hours and hundreds or thousands of dollars customizing it, tailoring it to their specific needs, and that’s as it should be. They are getting exactly the value they want. They’re not wrong.
My needs are different. I want the damn thing to work the moment I unpack it and put it on my site. That’s key: I’m busy. I don’t have a lot of time to spend monkeying around with every last feature. I just want it to work. I’m also a cheap bastard. Elegant Themes is a membership that lets you use any of their themes for $40 a year, and they’ve got about 50 or so different premium themes for me to try out. If you’ve been a subscriber of this blog for a while, you know that it’s changed themes and looks more than some people change their underwear.
So here’s my recommendation: if you are in the “I just want it to work out of the box” camp and want a premium look to your WordPress site without a premium pain in the butt to make it that way, consider looking at Elegant Themes and shelling out the ten cents a day for it. If you want someone to help you make it work or customize it, I also recommend PodCamp Boston lead organizer and personal ninja someone to help you do it.
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I second your opinion about elegantthemes. I’ve been using their themes since 2008 both for my own websites and blogs and for my clients. My own website (http://www.thesacredseduction.com) runs on Polished theme that I have modified to suit my needs. Their customer service is excellent.