In this video we'll go over premium themes and why it's worth paying a little bit of money to support
the theme developers premium themes or those that have advanced functionality and display features.
They also remain under development.
As time goes on ensuring that they are always compatible with the latest version of Wordpress and that
no security holes or breaking changes happen by the end of this video.
You'll know about several resources for finding premium themes and you'll have some criteria with which
you can rate themes to see if they fit your needs.
The theme that we just activated called affinity from WordPress dot com I think qualifies as a premium
theme even though it doesn't cost the money.
The reason is it's backed by a proven development team at Automatic the same company that makes and
is responsible for Wordpress itself and even though they've placed it in their WordPress dot.com area
for theme's you can download it for your Wordpress dot org self-hosted WordPress site.
What makes a premium theme premium isn't just that it costs money per se but it's that it's supported
by a team of developers that are going to keep up with wordpress updates as well as make sure there's
no security holes and that the site doesn't have any breaking changes as Wordpress updates and they
come out with updates for the theme.
Here's a theme demo that I have opened over here and this is what it looks looks like when it's all
built out.
It has some navigation down here that scrolls you to the proper place on the page but if you see the
way that it works it's a beautiful theme that has a scrolling home page with different sections and
fixed background images et cetera.
You can really use this theme for any type of site that you like.
And inside of let's say one of the interior pages there's also you know some great lay out here I think
potentially under gallery they show some images the way that they have some alignment left alignment
and full width images look great.
And what makes this a premium theme are all these layout features but especially that there's a system
in place that the developers have the ability to keep up with changes and make sure that the site always
looks great even as Wordpress updates.
So what about other free themes in the theme directory at Wordpress dot org.
These are vetted for viruses and other things like that but they aren't necessarily premium themes and
you have to make a judgment call on whether you want to use any of these themes at all whether they've
been around a long time they're updated and whether they're going to be updated in the future.
This is the resource that you get from any of your Wordpress dashboard pages under appearance themes
and then add new From there you can do a search for themes for different types of themes and different
features.
And it's pulling from the Wordpress darg repository where I just was over here.
You can see that there is quite a lot of them if you just pick one at random and look at the details
you can see the number of stars the version number but there's not much more information about who the
theme is by.
You can link through to their own link but just because it's on the Wordpress theme repository doesn't
mean that it's going to be an ongoing updated theme into the future.
Now at Wordpress dot org.
Under themes you can click commercial themes and this is a list of commercially supported GPL themes.
Meaning it's the general public license.
It doesn't mean that it must be zero cost.
It really just means that when you receive the software it's not restricted to how you can use it.
With that said these themes and the fact that they come from premium theme providers means that most
likely they're going to be updated in the future and they'll keep up with updates instead of Wordpress
So this is a good resource to look for premium themes.
I've recommended a few more in the introductory chapters of this course one of which is studio press
and studio press dot com.
You can see that these premium themes all exist and they cost a little bit of money you can get a developer's
license to use all of these themes freely and they do depend on a framework.
And we're going to talk about frameworks and child themes in the next video.
A few examples of themes from Studio press based on the Genesis framework are those when you go to W.P.
of course com the student resource page is one called parallax.
And when you get your own sandbox site the first site that opens up for you is a Genesys Web site on
the theme called parallax Pro.
It has all these nice features nice dropdown menu up here.
If you open an interior page it has some nice pull images that are aligned right and aligned left.
It's got some really nice features and studio press and Genesis.
Keep up with wordpress updates as needed.
Here's an example of a client site that I did using the parallax theme.
This is the lumber yard skateboard and snowboard shop in Breckenridge Colorado.
And you could see there's a lot of similarities.
They have their own style and including a premium plug in for an Instagram feed that shows how they
can open up the Instagram photos into a light box display like this.
That's just another example of a nice Genesis based studio press premium theme and other resource for
premium themes is called theme forest on the Vado market the inforced has a lot of Wordpress themes
in their repository for sale and some of the best ones and most popular are called the X theme and here's
an example of the X theme demo.
The themes and example of a premium theme that is a multi-purpose theme and has so many possibilities
and even different extensions that they provide.
It has a front end editing page builder and it's supported by a lot of different developers and you
know that it's always going to work into the future.
Another example is one called Proxima on the theme forest repository.
Here's a snowboard coaching site that was done using that theme.
It has a nice video based slideshow which can be video or still photos as you scroll down and you can
see it's a nice premium theme with some of its moving CSSA pieces.
Again a premium theme that if you look and do your research you know it's been used by more than 100000
customers on this theme.
And you can do your research there to make sure that the theme developers have been around a long time
and are going to be keeping the theme supported.
Just because a theme costs money doesn't mean that it's an actual premium theme that's going to be supported
into the future.
Here's an example of a site that I made using a theme forest theme.
It's got these nice zoom rollovers in my display up here.
These are recent posts and more recent posts come down here and it's an example of a nice looking theme
that I bought on theme forest for this client.
Again here is a nice Instagram feed.
With that same premium Instagram plug in will go over later in this chapter another premium theme and
plug in provider is WPA Dev and we'll be talking about them in a later part of this chapter as well.
And here's an example of a premium theme that they produced on a framework that they made called upfront.
It's a front end editing piece of software for Wordpress and it has this nice video intro at the top
of the home page in one of their samples.
And these are just some sample photos that are pixilated for file size but it's a sample of one of their
premium themes at WBM udev
this video was an introduction to premium themes and it showed that premium doesn't necessarily mean
that a theme costs money.
The best themes have modern features that are easy to implement but they also have the support of their
creators on an ongoing basis.
In the next video we'll go over theme frameworks for Wordpress and how child themes work.
Let's do it.