PageLines: one of the elite WP theme platforms

Choosing a WordPress theme for your new blog is not always an easy decision. Many new bloggers choose to go with free WordPress theme just for the fact that they feel uncomfortable spending any money on WP theme. If a blogger is not ready to invest a couple of hundred dollars in their business by picking up a premium theme, he/she won’t achieve too much success in the long run.

Not all premium themes are created the same. Paying for a product does not make it a decent one. Bloggers need to do their due diligence to make sure they pick a theme that is right for their business over the short and long run. Here are 10 things you want to pay attention to when picking up a new premium WordPress theme:

1. Design: if you are paying for a WordPress theme, you may as well pick one that has a decent design. You can always make changes to your website, but you do not want to have to start from scratch.
2. Developer’s background: some premium themes can be very tempting right from the minute you see them. Doing a background check on the developer(s) behind these themes can give you a better idea whether they are worth investing in.
3. Customer praises and complaints: Google is your friend here. Just search for negative and positive comments that your favorite themes have gotten to make sure you save yourself from future headaches.
4. Options page: every powerful WordPress theme needs a decent back-end (0ptions page). Themes such as Thesis and Platform Pro have powerful back-ends that make it easy for their users to make changes to their websites. Do your research beforehand to find out whether your favorite theme has a decent options page.
5. Customization: even though you are paying for your theme, that does not mean you should not go out of your way to make your website look and feel unique to your visitors. A theme that is easy to customize can save you a lot of trouble here.
6. SEO: a WordPress theme that is not search engine friendly can set you back and reduce your blog’s potential. Take Thesis for instance. It is very search engine friendly and lets its users address some of the top SEO factors right from the options page.
7. License: I don’t know about you but I hate those WP themes with annoying licenses. As a blogger, I do not want to spend any time trying to figure out what I can or can’t do with my WordPress theme. GPL themes save you from having to deal that trouble.
8. Updates: what good is a premium theme if the developer behind it does not update the code once in a while. Do your research online to see whether the developers you plan to purchase your theme from have offered regular updates for their themes in the past.
9. Demo: never ever buy a theme without getting a demo up-front. Most theme clubs let you do just that. By test driving themes, you will have a better chance of picking up the best option for your business.
10. Scalability: if you are just getting started with your blog, there is a good chance most top premium themes will do for your site. But if you plan to add videos, images, podcasts, and other types of media to your website in the future, you want a theme that can handle those.

Picking a premium WordPress theme should not have to be difficult. You just have to make sure you do your research before parting ways with your hard earned money for a theme that may not meet your standards.

If you are looking to get your hands on a decent premium WordPress theme, you shouldn’t miss these theme shops:

Elegant Themes: if you have a very tight budget and still want to get your hands on a decent set of premium themes for WordPress, you should give these guys a try. They keep their prices low and do have some very well designed themes.

WP Zoom: a wonderful theme shop that offers a decent collection of video blogging, pro blogging, and business themes. Some of their themes are very good looking and perfect for beginners.

Blog Oh Blog: the theme shop that I picked my current theme for BloggingOT. Since then, these guys have come up with a bunch of more powerful themes. While I will be graduating from the current theme I am using on this website, I still recommend this shop to new bloggers.

Press 75: another one of those shops that I keep going back to for more. It has some of the best pro blogging and video blogging themes on the market.

PageLines: the folks behind Platform Pro, which is one of the most flexible themes on the market. Their themes work for portals or regular blogs. The fact that they offer matching BBpress  themes for their WP themes is a huge plus.

Picking the right theme for your blog will take a bit of time. It never hurts to see as many designs as possible before pulling the trigger.

Convergence: a very clean, search engine friendly WordPress theme for bloggers. It is currently being used by a handful of top communities (design, tech, …) on the Internet.

Caulk: a powerful theme that can be used for magazine and regular blogs. It is social media friendly and has plenty of ways for you to promote your content.

Deadline: a classic pro blogging theme that comes with multiple color schemes and plenty of widget areas for you to take advantage. It’s social media and ad friendly too.

Evolutionary: a very attractive WordPress theme that takes full advantage of jQuery to bring a dynamic experience to your visitors. It has multiple color schemes too.

ProBlog: a clean and attractive WordPress theme that is easy to customize and very flexible. It integrates social networking icons and your Twitter feed. It has an ad manager too.

Be the judge: which one of the above themes do you like the most?

These 5 powerful WordPress frameworks can save you money and time when developing a new design for your WordPress blog:

Genesis: Genesis Framework is one of my favorite ones out there. You can not only use it to develop your own child themes, you can also use the already developed child themes available on StudioPress to get the job done faster.

Elemental: may not be as well known as the above items, but it does allow you to develop dynamic WordPress themes fast. If you want to clone Digg or develop a clean blogging theme for WordPress, Elemental has you covered.

Headway Themes: a very powerful framework that can be easily customized to fit your blog’s needs. It has a powerful back-end and is search engine friendly too.

Thesis: one of the most popular frameworks for WordPress. It has been getting a lot of heat recently for its stance on GPL. Still, it has a very powerful back-end that you can take advantage of to optimize your website for SEO, customize its look and feel, and change those small details without touching your code.

Frugal theme: another clean platform that you can take advantage of to develop a new child theme for your personal blog. It also can be used for WordPress MU if you are planning to own a blog network. Great for landing pages too.

Are you using a theme framework for your blog?

Web directories may be the old school way of organization information, but it’s still very effective. No matter what niche you are in, you are not going to be the only player involved. It pays to do some research and find out about goods and services that your readers may find handy. DirectoryPress is designed to let you organize your information in a more effective fashion.

This theme’s back-end is quite impressive. It has a ton of options and lets you customize almost all aspects of your website. You can define categories for your website easily. DirectoryPress is image friendly as well. If you are starting a premium directory, you can use this theme to put together a membership package for your visitors.

Overall, DirectoryPress is a solid WordPress script that gives you yet another way to provide more value to your visitors. You’ll have to do some research to build a killer directory. With DirectoryPress, at least you don’t have to worry about the platform.

Answer Theme is pretty straight-forward to use and comes with everything you need to give your readers the chance to discuss their questions and experiences with the world. The “Auto Install” feature will give you a head-start with your site. So you won’t have to set everything up from scratch. You get to display the latest questions by your community members on your home-page. The same goes for popular and unanswered questions.

What I like about this theme is its simple design and user management features. It even allows you to have your own side-blog. So you can technically create a Q&A portal without relying on a sub-domain or sub-folder install to get it done. Answer Theme comes with multiple color schemes, which helps.

Overall, Answer Theme is a unique theme that lets you add yet another cool feature to your blog. Just like your forum and job boards, you will have to spend time to manage this section of your site properly. But it’s worth it all in the end.

For starters, the makers of Eco Pro will donate 10% of everything you pay to help save the environment. That’s a very noble way to run business. The theme comes with a featured section that you can use to push your favorite page or section of your website. You can also change the color and look and feel of your website by changing the color scheme in the back-end. You can have more than one featured story and even fit videos in your featured section.

The theme is ad ready and image friendly as well. You can easily add your images and other types of multi-media files to your website fast. What’s fun about this theme is the fact that it can be used to build a fully-fledged portal with your blog hosted on the side.

This theme won’t write your content for you, but it can save you time and effort when starting your green blog. A portion of your fee goes towards helping the earth as well. If you are ready to start your blog or give your green blog a new make over, Eco Pro is a good starting place.

Thanks to WordPress, anyone can put up a website in a matter of minutes. There are plenty of themes that you can choose from to give your website the look and feel you crave. But if you are interested in giving your visitors ways to contact you or follow your work online on your blog, these 4 personal blog WordPress themes come in handy:

Social Life: integrates all your favorite social media services into one page. So essentially, you won’t have to do anything other than doing what you have been doing on Twitter and other social networking sites. This theme takes care of the rest.

AntiSocial: one of the best aggregator themes on the market. If you happen to be invovled heavily in the social media, you are going to love using this theme. It’s pretty flexible and makes it easy to create a website that your visitors can use to get in touch with your work.

BusinessCard: a very simple and clean theme designed to help you create your online business card in form of a website. Makes it pretty easy to build a mini-site about you and your projects.

MyStream: a colorful WordPress theme for anyone interested in starting a personal blog. Shows you streams from your popular social networking sites as well.

As you can tell, starting a personal blog couldn’t be any easier with WordPress. So what are you waiting for? Just go and register your own name as your domain and get going!

Job Board Theme is a premium WordPress theme that lets you create a job board for your blog fast. You won’t even have to know any programming to get started. Of course, if you know design or have the budget to hire a designer, you can change the default look and feel and get even more value out of the theme. Job Board Theme makes life easy either way.

Whether you want to charge people for posting to your job board or make it available for free to those who register an account on your blog is another issue. But you can get a whole lot done with Job Board Theme. It not only makes it easy for you to define new categories and customize the structure of your website easily, you can also make it easy for your visitors to post their listings to your site. Since the theme integrates PayPal, you won’t have too much trouble collecting money.

As you can see, the theme is very flexible and comes with a powerful back-end that makes it easy to make changes and customize things without having to write a line of code. The theme makes managing your job board easier by auto-expiring posts and managing your payments. Certainly one of the most affordable ways to add a job board to your blog.

So you want to improve a blog? If you don’t, you are probably in the wrong business. Every blogger, whether newbie or advanced, should be on the lookout for ways to improve her blogs and take it to the next level. You can always work on your content, broaden the topics that you cover, and put more time into your daily research to write higher quality content for your visitors. But, there are plenty of other ways to improve your blog. Your goal should to provide more value to you readers, and one way to do that is by creating a job board, specific to your niche. These days a lot of people are looking for jobs, and many of your readers will appreciate it if you provide them with opportunities to improve their position or find a new job. Besides, if your job board catches fire, you can always charge the employers for the right to list on your job board. So you get to help other people out and monetize your blog in the process.

There are plenty of scripts and software packages that help you develop your own job board. But if you are using WordPress, that’s all you will need to get started. You are going to need a premium job listing theme to make things easier, but you won’t need to pay for an expensive license or a script that may or may not work on your site. There are two themes that are specifically made for bloggers who want to build a job board along side their blog. Both are very easy to install and help you set your board up without having to write too much code (if any):

• Jobpress
• Tapp Jobs

JobPress: JobPress is a premium theme that makes it super easy to create a sophisticated job board around your niche. You just install it, set up your categories and pages, and you are ready to go. The theme won’t cost you too much and does give you the chance to monetize it (whether you want to do it now or later).

Tapp Jobs: a very simple and clean WordPress theme that lets you start a job board around your niche fast. It’s very simple to install and highly customizable. So as long as you know some design or can afford a designer, the sky’s the limit. You can install it in your “job” sub-directory as a stand-alone blog and link it to your main blog. Can’t get easier than that.

As you can see, it’s not too tough to start a job board. You do want to give people incentive to come to your board and post and look for jobs. But the technical side of things shouldn’t be too hard as long as you are using one of the above themes.