How do Premium Mod add values?

[foress]

Matt said it in the interview with Jeff. I think Jeff supported on his point to 'add value' as well. And most of the WordPress contributors also thought we should as well.

Without doubt, that will be Premium Mod's focus for a foreseeable period.

My question is a simple HOW? How doyou think that Premium Mod will add value to the themes?

- Is changing the theme into a different direction considered as adding value? (Like Coffee Lite, Photo Edition)

- What about adding certain functionality into the theme? (Like Chrommerce)

- What about combining the best of both themes? (Like FreshMortar)

- What are the any other way that you could think of?

Would love to hear the opinions from you guys, as that will dictate the direction for the future of Premium Mod.

Thanks.

[small potato]

coming up with something useful and good lookin by combining the best of both themes is rare because each commercial theme is (typically) built for a certain function, niche or layout. styles clash and spacings don't add up. they're more trouble than they're worth.

you can add value by simply expanding the theme rather than removing some parts of it. new color schemes, child themes, more custom page templates, improved commenting template.

[Ryan]

Recoding them from scratch so that they're less buggy, less resource intensive and load faster would be a good idea IMO.

I did this for a client a while back who wanted their site to load ninja fast. They wanted me to figure out why WP Super Cache wasn't helping their site load any quicker. It was quite obvious that the theme was coded poorly, so I cut down the download size by 70% and removed some IE6 bugs while I was at it. The same could done of many of the premium themes out there, although a few of them are moderately light on page load anyway. The likes of the StudioPress themes couldn't be cut down very much as they're already moderately light on code as it is anyway. But a few of the more bloated premium themes could easily be hacked down to size in a very useful way.

[Ryan]

Oh, and welcome to the forum Small Potato :)

[greenshady]

While I haven't personally worked with the themes you've modified thus far, I have done a lot of work with other people's premium themes. Most of the time, this has been reworking code so that it's more efficient and just plain works correctly. Honestly, I've been very close to starting a site called "PremiumThemeFixer.com" a few times. As a developer, I see far more value in cleaning up the mess that's in many of premium themes.

One of the things I'd like to see is the removal of theme options. Yes, remove them. Then, replace the code with widget-ready areas. This way, users can add anything they want rather than what the theme developer wants.

The most value will come in making themes more user friendly and more flexible.

Additional page templates are always cool. This is one things I think many themes fall short on. Of course, most themes have the basic Archives and Links templates, but I'd like to see more.

[Mike Smith]

I have to agree with the page templates, more widgetized areas, child themes, theme color/style options, ect. Adding onto the base seems better than just stripping things away. Fixing codes and making the themes run faster would be a good idea too.

[davecoveney]

I concur with Justin above - some premium themes are very good, some not. What we've noticed is that a great many have some serious performance issues. For example, one client had inadvertently hired two companies to develop a solution for them (they weren't terribly well organised) and the competitor's solution was based on a restyled premium theme.

Can you guess how many queries were firing for some posts?

Just under 300!

That's seriously bad news for the performance of a busy site when you should, ideally, be looking at around 30 max.

On the other hand, we were charging something like 8x as much as the other guy, so most of our code is fully custom and optimised.

[Jeffro]

Like Justin, I've been pondering quite a bit about opening a shop called ReThemer.com where I would take a theme and redo it while keeping much of it in tact. Much like you are doing. So kudos for actually doing it although I would have charged for the modifications.

No one theme seems to suit people but rather, a few unique pieces from three different themes could go together well. I've done this in the past, take code and features from one theme and put them in another which usually ends up as a mess but I eventually get it to work.

I'd say to add value to your modified commercial themes, I would provide perhaps a different layout than the original. Maybe add in a different featured post box or provide one if it does not exist. Creating specific page templates for a theme is also a plus. Give a theme that doesn't have cool drop down menu support, cool drop down menu support. Most of the time, if you just swap out the images and colors, that can be enough to transform the theme into something different. Hell, most of the time when i buy a theme, I'm mostly buying it for the layout which is already coded. I add in my own images and colors.

[foress]

Thank you for all the valuable input, especially Justin, small potato and Jeffro. Here's what I understood about adding value from your feedback:

- add stuff (color scheme, feature, child themes, page template), rather than removing it.

- Optimize it so that it loads faster and less buggy.

- Increase flexibility (more widgetized area, less theme options).

- Change the layout (color/images).

Thanks again. There's much work to do now and I have a couple of very interesting ideas. :)

[314media]

I agree with most of the people above. The premium themes just have too much bloat. Removing that control panel and just making the theme work out of the box would be a good goal. Sometimes, taking a premium theme and brand new site and trying to figure out where content goes after you post it takes some time ..

Personally, I hate those theme options and wish they didn't exist all together. Making a premium theme work with widgets, short-codes or even hand coded PHP would be ideal..

I also think plugin info should be in the theme tag/CSS description. (when I code 'em, thats what I do) because trying to figure out what you need to install sometimes in on the site, then sometimes in the readme .. It's annoying.. put that junk in the CSS...