I just came across this image of a photoshop illustration:

click on image for full size

I’ve just been over at Themeshaper’s blog and reading up on a very interesting discussion: The Ethics of WordPress Themes at a Premium

It comes back to my thoughts a few days ago, about going Premium or not. It gets down to a hard decision even though a couple of excellent points were made inside of the comments both ways.

… what these premium theme providers are doing … we would call that “Evil”

CHASE SAGUM

… themes link and use lots of internal WordPress functions, which make them linked under the GPL and subject to being a GPL-compatible license. If a theme (or a plugin) used no internal WP functions or APIs, then it could probably be considered independent, but that would be really really hard for a theme.

MATT MULLENWEG

Go take a read over at The Ethics of WordPress Themes at a Premium

We have been running our local community(City) website for the last couple of years and we’ve tried everything from building a web solution from scratch to outsourcing the work and we weren’t ever happy with the outcome.

Finally after a lot of frustration we decided to build the whole website as a CMS using Wordpress. And I must say that I’m glad we did it. The website looks, feels and work excellent.

We actually used Wordpress-Mu which is the multi-blogging platform version of Wordpress. It’s actually the exact same version hosted on www.wordpress.com and allows all the people from our community to actually start up their own blog right on Secunda.co.za

We haven’t actually launched the whole “start a blog” facility but it will be coming soon. Go have a look and let me know what you think…

Secunda.co.za

Wordpress

I’ve always loved designing for Wordpress and building my own themes for it. It’s fun, easy and really versatile. You can code a whole CMS with wordpress and no one will ever even know you used Wordpress. I’ve even started to build websites for clients and friends using Wordpress for easy editability.

All in all, I’m a great fan of Wordpress and even thought it’s a bloggin platform I still prefer it waaay above other CMS software like Joomla, Dotnetnuke etc. I tried using Joomla a few months back and that just didn’t end up well.

Yes Wordpress does have it’s limits, but I’ve pushed it way beyond that a few times. My core dev language is .NET and my PHP expertise is a bit limited at the moment. I reckon if I sharp my PHP up a bit, I might be able to push Wordpress even further.

Ok, so my point is… I’m thinking of moving into the marketing with Premium Themes. Yes, there is a whole lot of competition out there like Woothemes and Revolution but I personally don’t think all the angles are targeted when it comes to a CMS via Wordpress. The limits of Wordpress isn’t pushed with most of these themes. More can be done and a greater user experience can be gained.

I’m looking into the market, what there is and what the need is. Who knows, maybe…