WPDesigner.com is a site that I’ve visited a few times before to check out the free wordpress themes on offer - most notable is the jello mello theme that I’ve used for the maltese dogs site. I was really surprised to find out today that the owner has sold it on sitepont… and not only sold it, but for a final price of $66,000!

Statistics wise, the site itself was doing ’okay’…

• URL: http://www.wpdesigner.com/
• Page views/month: 896,000
• Monthly Revenue: 890
• Google Pagerank: 7
• Uniques/Month: 70,000

but I’m struggling to find a justification for the price tag of $66,000 - that’s more than 6 times a multiple of its yearly earnings! I can only assume that Mr Pawel Ciszewski is one cash up dude with a heck of a lot of take over and valuation experience.

The risks here for Pawel are enormous. He needs to replace the original blog owner - both his work AND his quirky personality. With a mug shot like this… it’s going to be tough.

With absolutely no theme development experience, Pawel intends to outsource everything whilst just sitting in the background and plugging in the doe. The first release of the monthly club theme is going have to be huge in order for him not to lose the existing club members who are already cynical of his money, money, money outlook.

Popularity: 7%

WP Premium is a theme released by wpRemix. I’ve seen it used in a few blogs I’ve visited, including itResource who was good enough to give me a free web hosting account (I have ample space on my current server but I’ve been experiencing some downtime due to dns server changes at my current host (Servers Australia) recently so I’ve realised the benefits of spreading my sites around!). So I’ve downloaded it and tried it out at sliick.com, which is now hosted with itResource.

What I like

1. It’s nicely layout out.
2. The dynamic tabbed sidebar for the search, archives, and categories is a great way of conserving space without sacrificing usability.

What I don’t like:

1. the tags widget is not well supported on the sidebar (it looks like crap)
2. I had to uncomment the_tags() line in the single.php to show my tags. Why not put it in by default?
3. the links on the black theme that I’m using are black which means it looks just like the rest of the text! I had to alter the stylesheet to make them blue.

The Conclusion? Whilst the dynamic tabbing is great, I’m sure it’s been ripped off a few other themes like the revolution or wp-magazine theme. The cons I’ve listed are such simple, careless design mistakes that really drag down the theme designer. It’s definitely not polished enougth to be deserving of the name WP ‘Premium’.

Del.icio.us : wordpress themes

Popularity: 6%