Monday Poll: Premium Theme Features
Monday
Jan 5, 2009
January 2009 is Theme Month here at Fun with WordPress so I thought I would kick things off by getting an idea of exactly where you think the line is drawn between themes and premium themes.
Matt made a distinction recently that I thought quite apt and it is one I have decided to adopt. Matt explained his view that there are premium themes, and there are proprietary themes. Only the latter require payment.
With the recent fuss about GPL I think this is an important distinction to make because there are a number of premium themes that are also now free themes. It is clear to me that a theme need to not be expensive to be premium.
Despite this there must be a tipping point where a theme becomes a premium theme so what are the important factors that could tip the balance?
Layout Options
Some premium themes come with settings pages that allow you to choose your layout, others with alternative page templates with different layouts, others still with various different versions of the theme that you can download.
I don’t think this is an important part of a premium theme. It is a nice option but in many cases offers options that people won’t use.
Decorative Options
Decorative options can include a wide variety of things. First, there is an image uploader. This may or may not do things such as fade between multiple images. Secondly you have options to change the background colour, or the colour scheme of the theme as a whole. There are often various different versions of a theme to suit a particular niche which you can download.
I also don’t think this is essential. It is certainly nice to have but I think a theme could still be premium without it.
Menu handling
Most premium themes offer a much better way of organising menus than comes by default with WordPress. These may be something simple like a tick box to specify if you want a page included in the header to a complete menu builder system where you can add in non-page related links.
I do think this is an area that any theme calling itself premium must address. The default system with WordPress is simply not sufficient on its own and the amount of thought that ought to have gone into a premium theme means to me that leaving this out would be a big no-no.
Category Handling
In the same way as page menus, premium themes might let you include or exclude categories from a the main list or re-order them without needing to get into the code.
While I don’t think this is essential it certainly does show that the author has given the appropriate amount of thought. For me this wouldn’t make a premium theme, but it would contribute toward it.
Custom Images
It is very popular to allow images, either thumbnails or fullsize, to be added to posts via the custom fields option, or even for an extra area to be added to make it even easier.
This doesn’t seem necessary for every theme, but perhaps it should be an option?
Feedburner / Google Analytics insertion
If the object of a premium theme is to remove as much of the work as possible and to remove the need to edit code then you would expect a theme to allow you to redirect your feedburner feed, and the include your tracking code, whether it be Woopra or Google Analytics.
There are plugins for both of these so you can argue about their necessity when it comes to deciding whether a theme is premium or not.
Advertising Management
It has become popular recently to add advertising management to premium themes. Not every site needs it, but to have it available when you do need it is certainly an advantage.
I would like to think that this wasn’t a necessary part of any premium theme, but perhaps others will require it.
Tabbed Area
As with many of the other items in this list, tabbed areas are certainly popular, especially when it comes to magazine style themes, but are they really that important? If you want a tabbed area then a theme that doesn’t have it is going to fail. There is no harm in having it an option to include even if it isn’t used. Given the popularity of them this isn’t a bad idea.
I personally don’t think it is essential.
SEO Basics
Most premium themes boast that they have considered SEO quite carefully. This goes along with good coding practices and it is hard to think of any good themes that haven’t given it some thought, i.e. including keywords, creating an appropriate header, etc. Some even offer the option to prevent archive pages being indexed.
I do think a certainly base level of SEO work is essential. There are established best practices and these at least should be followed.
Plugin Ready
A lot of themes both premium and non-premium will automatically use popular plugins if they are installed such as related posts and better post navigations.
I also don’t see this as terribly important. Nice to have, sure, but not that important.
Child Themes
Any theme can have a child theme, but it is far easier if the theme is engineered with that in mind. This may mean including extras hooks in functions.php, or even within the theme pages themselves, and certainly means the CSS will be constructed on a more modular basis.
Although I do see the benefits in child themes I personally prefer to just modify the base theme. Child themes seem a little much like hard work; having said that I do think premium themes will start to offer child themes in the near future instead of variations on their theme.
The poll
These are the features that sprang to my mind when thinking about premium themes, but this doesn’t cover everything. The poll this week isn’t a click and choose poll, I want to know what you consider to be the essential features for EVERY premium theme?
What features must a theme have to be considered premium? or to put it another way, what features prevent a theme being premium if they were missing?
Comments
Justin Tadlock (http://justintadlock.com)
January 5th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
The number one thing that makes a theme premium is not in your list — clean code. When I say clean, I mean standards-compliant XHTML and CSS with proper formatting of the code in the files (tabbing, spacing, etc.). Nearly every end user will have to dive into the code at some point. If your code is poorly written, then that's going to make life tough for the user.
I download new themes every day and rarely look past one or two files in a theme before deleting it because of the crappy code. I've been hired to fix (fix, not customize) proprietary themes and wanted to pull my hair out because of the code. You haven't created a premium theme unless your code is premium.
Another thing I don't see enough of is the ability to translate the theme through localization. All too often, we get plain ol' English in the theme files. The simple step of setting up your theme for localization can gain you thousands of new users. The WordPress community isn't only made up of English-speaking users; it's a worldwide thing. Why make your users directly edit 100s of lines of text and have to edit those same lines again when it's time to upgrade the theme?
Aside from those two things, you need a theme that's readable, usable, accessible, and has a good design that focuses on content. Everything else is just secondary.
Andrew Rickmann (http://www.wp-fun.co.uk)
January 5th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Thanks Justin.
I had considered clean code but very, very briefly when I was thinking about SEO. I didn't consider it enough. My feeling was that it was attention to detail, and through that thinking about the user, that really mattered and localisation and clean code probably demonstrate that better than anything else.
Some time ago I asked people here was the most desirable features of a theme were and one of the commenter's said very clearly that it was so simply to offer localisation for a theme if you do it up front that it was particularly poor that no one did it. I am guilty of that very much with my plugins, it is one of those things that gets put aside in favour of quick development.