Moving from Free to a Premium Theme

I’ve only been blogging regularly since January, so I haven’t decided whether a premium theme is worth the investment. Maybe on its 1-year anniversary, I’ll purchase the one that I’ve been eyeing for a while, Standard Theme.

All that aside, I’ve been using a variety of free themes on WordPress.com and self-hosted including Pink Touch 2, Publish, and others, so I’m always on the lookout.

For example, WPExplorer recently launched Authentic Themes. It’s a $40 theme bundle that includes 20 themes at launch with a promise to add more frequently. So, here’s my general experience and somewhat of a review of Authentic Themes as encountered them.

I noticed that they all share the same clean and minimalist look. I wasn’t ready to throw money at an untested product, so I downloaded one of their two free themes, Apollo on my blog, North of Park.

Before downloading, you have to tweet or like it on Facebook or wait 40 seconds before it starts.

After uploading and activating Apollo, I was pretty satisfied outside of the box before messing around with any of the theme options. Theme options include atom logo, custom footer, top page ad, and social networking links to display at the top.

All themes come with support through the knowledge base, which is just a Q and A area with general questions for all themes. There is a bug report system and knowledge base for anybody who purchases the bundle.

Also, purchasing unlocks resources such as top header notification and coming soon page, which I didn’t get a chance to test.

Pricing is dead simple. $40 a year gets you a standard license, $80 a year for developer, and $250 one-time for a lifetime license.

Conclusion:

I would recommend Authentic Themes to anybody in need of a simple, minimalist theme for their website. They are a new player in this vast industry of WordPress themes.

The launch of Authentic Themes goes to show you the ever changing market of WordPress themes.

Can anybody remember when there were only a handful of theme businesses? Now we have ThemeForest, Authentic Themes, WooThemes, iThemes, WPZoom, Themify, WPMU Dev, not to mention all the individual theme makers!

What do you think of the WordPress theme business?