There is a huge growing trend towards buying “premium” WordPress themes — themes designed by freelancers and design agencies, heavily advertised on popular weblogs and offered for a fixed price.

 Buy A Theme or Use A Free Theme?

In his recent article Kyle Scove has discussed the advantages of Premium WordPress themes:

“The availability of premium themes:

• gives WordPress users a chance to stand out from the crowd of free themes,
• allows the purchaser to see what they are going to get ahead of time,
• benefits the designers by allowing them the opportunity to do the work once, then have a steady source of income trickle in
• will likely result in even more income than if they were to create a custom made theme for a client.”

In this context, it is also important to understand that designers will be able to benefit from a premium theme if and only if the premium theme has something special to offer and there are users who might actually need it. More importantly, it’s important that users are willing to pay for it — many bloggers tend to replace WordPress themes on a regular basis.

“Premium” themes are less likely to be used for traditional blogs. They are worth considering only if a large web-project has to be developed. Besides, not only the blog-owners, but also designers can benefit from such themes as they won’t need to reinvent the wheel all the time if they have to cope with a rather complex issue.

Usually the development of a magazine-style design from scratch would cost $10,000 – $40,000. In these cases “premium” themes might address the needs of clients with smaller budgets.