I recently did a survey both here and on the Third Tribe forums in an attempt to figure out just what it is people want from a premium WordPress theme. We all keep creating but nobody ever really asks the question.
Every day somebody comes out with a theme with an options page that’s bigger than the previous. But is that what the customers want?
I got some great results both over here on the poll and also in the Third Tribe forums. I’m going to share the poll results with you here, first in bar form and then in a pie graph:
As you can see, the top results were as follows:
Great Design
A bit of a shocker to me, honestly. I thought more feature-oriented choices would be the highest ranked categories for premium WordPress themes. But get to Ember and Dribbble and everywhere else and look for inspiration, because great design is as important in a premium theme as it is in a free one or a custom site.
Ease of Customization
Not surprising being that the poll was posted on a Thesis-oriented site, but ease of customization came in second. People paid good money for your theme, so they’re going to want to be able to use it for their purposes.
Support
This is my personal reason for buying premium products. Have a support forum, a phone number, or be quick to respond to e-mails as that’s one of the important extras that premium theme purchasers are looking for from you when they buy.
So in closing, make sure that your site has a great design, is useful for a wide variety of people or extremely useful for a niche, and support the product like you want everyone to succeed with it. Which you do, so that shouldn’t be too difficult. 
I’m going to leave you with a great quote from Chris Brogan in his response on the Third Tribe forums that sums up my personal opinion on premium products in general pretty well:
“It has to do something really well that I can’t do myself. Thesis gives me better SEO plus some really simple business execution. Press75 Video Elements makes a video heavy site really easy with just a few copy/pastes. There are lots of others that DO something for me. I don’t pay for colors. I pay for function.”
– Chris Brogan
What are your thoughts on the matter?
sort of humorous sign picture by matt jiggins
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve found that the most useful element of a “Premium Theme” is a solid framework / foundation on which to build your own layout. WooThemes and Genesis are 2 examples of excellent frameworks, each with their own advantages and disadvantages over the other.
If you’re new to PHP / WordPress stick to WooThemes but if you don’t mind getting down and dirty with coding then Genesis is the better choice for you.
As more and more people create blogs and websites I am finding that there are a lot of people that buy a theme because some blog that they follow says it is the best thing since the remote control. Then they purchase the theme and it is more complicated than they expected. There are quite a few good premium themes available from iThemes but it all depends on your level of skill.
I bought Thesis because I liked the simplicity of the layout. It’s also advertised as very flexible and customisable, but… not for non-coders. The latest release has gone some way to remedy that but not far enough. They say Thesis 2.0 will go a lot further.
I hope so. The whole idea of WP based sites is ease of use without having to go deeply into php etc. Push button customisation is what most of us code-challenged non-geeks want.
While I appreciate that web designers and others love Thesis because they know how to do things, I’d put ease of use/customisation way above any other consideration. I’d love to play around with the theme more without having to spend hours and hours not getting it right. ;D
Max
Business needs vary from industry to industry. Some put more emphasis on clean code and compatibility across all browsers vs design.
Great post.
I’ll vote with Arelthia and Max, there’s a real need for premium themes and a framework behind them that makes it easy to customize them. Even if you’re a designer / developer a good premium theme system should help you create great sites while cutting your development time. And if you’re not a developer / designer the same system should make it possible to modify the theme without spending hours doing so.
I bought thesis because it’s supposed to be the best for SEO – and this is true. I was also under the impression that it woul be alot easier to customize. It’s a bit easier than some of the others, but it still isn’t easy.
I love some of the options – like the custom favicon uploader, the ability to change text, header and navigation styles, and a few other things.
There are a couple of things however that I’m shocked is so hard – changing the color of the background. The other thing is the ability to change the location of the navigation – it’s above the header. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would want it below the navigation – or, alternately part of it above (about, contact) and part of it below.
Something else which just occurred to me is the fact that you can’t just change the background or border color for the sidebars. Being able to do this would be really awesome!
Thanks for asking
Susanna
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