Elegant Themes – The “Best” Deal In WordPress?

Updated February, 2012: Elegant Themes has been on our radar for quite sometime, and we wanted to take a few minutes to explain what their club includes, why you should care, and ultimately – whether it’s a good investment.

Elegant Themes: History

Elegant Themes was started around April, 2008 and could originally be found at www.elegantwordpressthemes.com. Nick Roach, the owner, had created a couple of WordPress Themes, and he decided to create a WordPress Theme Club to showcase his work for others. Within a few months, there were a handful of beautifully designed premium WordPress themes with Bluesky, Bluemist, and Simplism Theme being the first three.

Sometime in late 2008 – early 2009, the company behind WordPress came through and told people they could no longer use the word “WordPress” in their URLs so around this time Nick moved everything to elegantthemes.com where he continues to operate business to this day.

Nick’s creation of a WordPress Theme Club was no different than many others who have attempted to do the very same thing over the years. The difference is that while most other premium theme providers charge $30 – $100 EACH, Nick has made it a priority to price his entire theme club at the insanely low price of $39/year (coming out to an average of about 54 cents per theme).

Elegant Themes: The Difference

Aside from creating some of the most beautifully designed premium themes for WordPress, Elegant Themes continues to be the best deal in WordPress for the following reasons:

Absolute Lowest Price – At 53¢ a theme, there is simply no other place on the entire web to buy premium themes at this price. Nowhere.
WordPres Support Forums – Support forums are nothing new, but what we love about the Elegant Themes forums are that you can not only ask Elegant Themes related questions, they also have places to ask other general WordPress related questions and problems. If you’ve found yourself looking for a forum that has knowledgeable, helpful people who understand and know WordPress like the back of their hand, Nick and his team of support people will be a breath of fresh air. Even if I didn’t love the themes themselves, I would keep my membership simply because of the WordPress support forums.
Extensive Shortcode Library – Shortcodes have made a big push into the development and design of WordPress Themes over the past year, and Elegant Themes provides some of the best shortcode options available. Better yet, they work with ALL of the 70+ themes in the collection. From content boxes, to tabbed content, to social sharing integration to even a premium content shortcode (that allows you to separate free and paid content on your site), you’ll be hard pressed to find shortcodes that are more valuable on any other theme today.
Long Term Focused – We have talked extensively with Nick over the years about his business and one thing that continues to impress us how he continues to focus on being at the cutting edge of both features and functionality. Meaning, he’s always looking for opportunities to integrate the latest and greatest features but not for the sake of functionality. Too many theme designers get caught up creating themes that they themselves like when ultimately what you want is a theme that is visually appealing to you and your visitors and SELLS them on whatever it is you are selling whether that is your brand, your product, or something else. Nick not only understands how to build themes, he understands how to build themes that SELL WELL, and that is VERY hard to find in the WordPress Theme marketplace.

Elegant Themes: The Decision

If you’ve spent any amount of time searching for free or premium themes for WordPress you have no doubt run across countless sites talking about why this theme or that is the best. After working with WordPress extensively for nearly 4 years, we can honestly say there is no better deal in the entire WordPress ecosystem than Elegant Themes.

Better yet, we’re not just recommending it to you, we are paying customers as well!

One of the great things about open sources is the vast amount of people working to make WordPress better. One of the problems with open sources is also this same thing. Too many times, there are sub-par “experts” who put together themes, plugins, or other related tools that are simply NOT the kind of products you want to use. Elegant Themes is not only at the opposite extreme of that spectrum, they are leading the pack and setting the standard for future WordPress Theme development into 2012 and beyond. We could not recommend any single company more than Elegant Themes.

Update: Elegant Themes just released an amazing plugin called Hand Held that will make your WordPress Theme mobile friendly. This works with just about any WordPress Theme – even if it not a theme from ElegantThemes.