I am a self admitted theme junkie. When I am bored I’ll scan through the themes at Graphic River just for ideas – and I think I’m up to about 40 plus themes I’ve bought from their various publishers – and at $50 a shot – that’s a few thousand dollars spent on themes ( many of which I never even got around to using… ). For example my newest niches site has a theme called Volt Magazine . The problem with most theme forest themes is they require manual uploading via FTP to the themes folder in your content directory or you will get a style sheet error.
I also have an account with Elegant Themes which is a theme club with 87 themes and counting for an annual price of $89 ( developers rate ). I used their styleshop theme to create my last site. But in all honesty, I find their themes a bit too artistic for straight forward niche site building – although operational wise they are totally bug free and very easy to use.
Recently though I’ve been finding myself almost exclusively going with themes from a site fittingly called Theme Junkie. They are a theme club like Elegant Themes, but their themes are far more applicable to niche site building. For example, this sites theme is called Resizable and is one I use quiet frequently on clients sites. Because their sites have clean code and don’t confuse things with elaborate scripts or style sheets, they load fast which helps with SERPS.
Another theme I use from Theme Junkie with regularity and is one of my favorites is called Publisher. This theme is clean, bold and very easy to use. It has the full leaderboard banner slot built into the header and is a great theme for presenting content professionally.
Keep in mind that with all niche sites – I set the front page to the page I’ve created with the primary article on it rather than using the standard blog layout.
One of the things I really like about this theme is the built in tabs in the right side widget bar that shows a thumbnail of the post. I also like the two level header menu bar which allows me to put pages on the top and menu categories on the bottom – or vise versa if I wanted.
I also like that all of Theme Junkies themes are very easy to use which means once I hand over the site to the client there is a lot less of a learning curve or things that can go wrong compared to when I use a site with a lot of short codes and edits.
Theme Junkie is likely one of the best $50 I’ve spent as a developer – which works out to about a $1.31 a theme.
