• Mexican Government: Big Fail http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/10/20/greenpeace.mexico/ #

When it comes down to using wordpress to power your business website there are not a ton of themes out there that actually make your site look like a website.. and not a blog. Fortunately I’ve come across these themes that actually do a great job at making your wordpress powered site look like you’re actually running a business. I’m really fond of Delirium, Concept and Benzo because they look a bit more sleek, clean and professional.

9 Now 11 Business Wordpress Themes: Delirium, Revival, Solutions, Cubit, Concept, Octofirst, Benzo, Twicet, Quaon, iBlogPro, WhiteHouse Pro

Delirium Wordpress Theme

Delirium Features:

• Theme compatible with Wordpress 2.8.x
• 100% tableless css design.
• Advanced typography.
• Custom Login panel.
• Advanced theme options panel.
• Integrated blog.
• Attractive front page slider.
• Widget ready right sidebar.
• 4 level page oriented custom dropdown menu.
• Additional footer menu.
• Additional full width page template.
• Threaded comments.
• CSS & XHTML valid.
• Cross-browser compatible.
• IE 6 png fix.
• Delivered with .png source files (.psd files delivered upon request)

View the LIVE DEMO

Revival Wordpress Theme

Features:

• Theme compatible with Wordpress 2.8
• 100% tableless css design.
• Very lightweight and fast loading theme.
• Easily manageable front page slideshow, with ability to place as many slides as you want.
• Widget ready right sidebar and 2 front page bottom bars.
• 4 level page and category oriented superfish dropdown main menu.
• CSS & XHTML valid.
• Cross-browser compatible.
• Additional full width page template.
• Delivered with .png source files (.psd files delivered upon request)

View the LIVE DEMO

Solutions Wordpress Theme

Theme Features:

• Theme compatible with Wordpress 2.8.x
• 100% tableless css design.
• Advanced typography.
• Advanced theme options panel.
• Integrated blog.
• Front page slideshow.
• Widget ready right sidebar.
• 4 level page oriented custom dropdown menu.
• Additional footer menu.
• Additional full width page template.
• Threaded comments.
• CSS & XHTML valid.
• Cross-browser compatible.
• IE 6 png fix.
• Delivered with .png source files (.psd files delivered upon request)

View the LIVE DEMO

Cubit Wordpress Theme

Main Features:

• The theme uses a FLASH LIKE javascript image transition at the mainpage only seen in flash before which suports an unlimted number of images.
• Highly flexible admin area, you are able to edit every content from the wordpress backend
• 6 different cholor schemes
• Multilevel Dorpdown menu, Breadcrumb Navigation, Post Pagination
• jQuery Lavalamp for main menu
• Advanced comments with reply function
• Ajax Contact Form
• Unobtrusive Javascript, Fallback scenarios if Javascript is turned of by the user
• Psd Files for every Skin, if you want to edit an existing Cubit Skin or create your own
• Valid html/css, works in all major browsers (IE6,7,8. FF, Opera, Safari, Chrome)

View the LIVE DEMO

Concept Wordpress Theme

Main Features:

• In 6 Colors uniquely styled themes (Blue, Green, Pink, Orange, Green, Dark Blue).
• All Core Page Templates (Home, Content Page, Image Gallery, Blog Post w/ comments styling, Search/Results, 404, and a Contact Form)
• Custom Admin Panel (Full CMS )
• Clean, commented code
• jQuery Lightbox
• jQuery Homepage & Gallery Slider
• Optional SIFR font rendering
• Gracefully degrading code (for older browsers)
• Layout PSD Files
• All Sliced PSD files (for easy re-skinning)
• Favicon Ready (just overwrite the browser icon with your own)The Custom Admin Panel features:1. Custom stylesheet selection (dropdown).2. Custom Logo entry.3. Turn SIFR on/off.

  4. Custom Homepage elements (callout box, feature box, blog feed).

  5. Custom Title and Subtitles on all pages.

  6. Navigation Link Control (header and footer)

  7. Custom footer copyright text.

View the LIVE DEMO or buy it.

Octofirst 2 Theme features

• Easy to customize
• Theme options panel with color picker included
• Custom write panels
• Drop down menus
• 4 sidebar-enabled areas for widgets
• Portfolio lightbox gallery. you can have as many portfolio pages as you want. TimThumb generates the thumbnails automatically
• Modular homepage design, full-width option available
• Modular homepage slider (which can be replaced easily with a static image), full-width option available, can take flv videos as well
• Clean & valid code, lightweight, optimized for speed
• Functional Ajax contact form
• Dark/light/rounded/square versions, as well as a bonus super-optimized theme version (which you are demo-ing now),designed to further reduce page load times. uses combined javascript files and CSS image sprites
• Automatically rounded corners with jQuery in the rounded theme version
• Cufon font replacement which won’t hurt your SEO
• Free fonts used & included
• All PSD source files included
• Twitter plugin with xml file-based caching
• When Twitter is off, a sidebar for regular content is activated in its place
• Tested on the 2.8 WordPress branch and the current release 2.8.4
• Styling for up to 5 levels deep threaded comments
• Gravatar ready
• Scissors plugin for easy image resizing
• RSS feeds ready
• jQuery improved, degrades gracefully when Javascript is turned off
• Comes with a bonus full-width page
• Localized in 2 languages: DE & IT; po files included so you can easily generate more translations if needed

View the live demo or buy it.

Benzo Wordpress Theme

Benzo is simple and clean Wordpress theme and comes with some nice features, like an image gallery, Youtube gallery, etc.

• Video Gallery (Category based)
• Image Gallery (Category based)
• Image Slider
• Pagination
• Mootools Lightbox (Imagezoom & Slimbox)
• 3 Page Templates: Single image page, gallery page, media page
• Widgetready Sidebar
• Mootools Dropdown Navigation
• Theme Options
• Google Analytics
• Works with Wordpress 2.8.4+

View the live Benzo demo or buy it.

Twicet Wordpress Theme

Twicet Features:

• Valid XHTM Strict1.0 and CSS 2 .1, tableless Design
• jQuery Support:
  • Fading Portfolio/Item slider
  • Dropdwon Menu, improved with jQuery
  • jQuery 100% unobtrusive wich degrades gracefully if javascript is turned off
  • Gallery Page with lightbox
  • Working ajax/php contact form
  • Newsticker
• All PSD files I used are included
• MANY Backend options to customize the Theme:
  • 5 Option Pages: general options, mainpage, portfolio, contact, blog
  • Highly flexible: for example the 3 content columns on the mainpage could be a mix of pages, posts and widgets, all administrated through the backendSame goes for portfolio footer
• Extensive Documentation File included

View the live demo or purchase this theme.

Quaon Wordpress Theme

Theme Features:

• Works with WP 2.8+
• 6 Color Schemes
• Includes PSD Files
• Has a Jquery Slider
• Threaded Comments
• Dropdown menus
• And lots more!

View the Live Demo

Really nice looking theme from called iBlogPro from Pagelines… Click here for details and Demo.

Really nice looking theme from called WhiteHouse Pro from Pagelines… Click here for details and Demo.

This is not by any means a definitive list. I will be updating this post with more business wordpress themes in the future. Looking for more Premium Wordpress Themes (view my post)

Doug Pray’s a documentary film maker who’s made the movies Scratch, Surfwise and Hype! among others. He has a new movie out called Art & Copy which I’m excited about. Check out the trailer. I was happy to see George Louis in it… he’s the ad giant who created the slogan “I want my MTV!”. Anyway, really looking forward to seeing this.

Matt Cutts from the Web Spam team at Google showcases the good and the bad of WordPress as seen through the eyes of Google, including basics on how Google search works and how you can boost your blog’s results in Google searches.

Envato’s celebrating their 3rd birthday and to celebrate they’re offering a very special Birthday Bundle that packs together 37 of their favourite items worth a total of $300 and offers them to you for a ridiculously low $20 price tag. Available for 3 days only (Aug 19 – 21) so you’ll have to hurry!! Check out the details and if you’re ready to take advantage of this great offer be sure to click the buy now button, I did!

Are you a fan of modern architecture, photography, interiors or DIY projects?  Then check out Plastolux, a blog run by my good friend and ol’ college buddy Tyler Goodro.  He posts exceptional finds from around the web related to modern interior design, architecture etc.  Very cool stuff to be seen indeed.

Here’s his words: “Plastolux used to exist as a place for me to show my portfolio. I have been a Multidisciplinary designer for 9 years now. I have a passion for interior design (heavy on the modern and retro modern side) but I do appreciate all forms of design. I spend several hours a day looking at blogs, magazines and other inspirational material. I enjoy sharing my finds, so this is how plastolux came to be.

One of my favorite things to read about is the Modern DIY. I love to see how the everyday person builds, hacks, or creates their own modern project. I will be posting as much Modern DIY as I can. I will also be sharing some of my own projects.”

I love the fonts being released by Svetoslav of Fontfabric.  And they’re releasing a new one almost every week. Totally amazing. Fontfabric now has a total of 10 free fonts available and more that are not free, but totally worth paying for.

Fontfabric is an independent type foundry, which was launched at the close of 2008 by designer Svetoslav Simov who is based in Sofia, Bulgaria. Their goal is to create high-quality fonts which stand in a unique class of their own, and which will serve as a good base for any designer project whether it be web, print, t-shirt design, logo etc.

Every week, a new and totally unique font will be rolled out of production, which you can easily buy or download free of charge.

Free Fonts

Paid Fonts

The fonts above are free.. the ones below are not, but still inexpensive. You can find them over at Myfonts.com

Each image below links to it’s page on Myfonts.com so you can see the entire families and test them out.

Felix over at Richwp.com has come up with yet another great new wordpress theme called Showcase (Photo). This theme is exactly that… a wordpress theme to showcase your photos/designs/products etc.

What’s unique about Felix’s themes are that they are clean and minimalistic meaning that the focus goes to the content (your images) and that’s what I like about them. They aren’t cluttered up with stylized design that goes out of fashion in a few months time. The focus should be on the photos and that’s why this theme stands out from all of the many photography wordpress themes out there.  And I dig that the navigation menu is condensed down into a simple drop down menu.

Simple homepage with image slideshow.

Gallery page displaying all your images.

Normal blog section so you can blog like normal.

Showcase Theme Features:

• Easy standard size banner integration for 234×60px, 250×250px, 125×125px banner
• Two color schemes – Bright and Dark (see Live Demo and Screenshot)
• Widget Ready
• Automatic image size generation. All photo sizes needed across the theme will be assigned and generated automatically.
• Easy installation and setup with included documentation.
• Threaded comments support
• Gravatar support for comments
• Extra “Sitemap” page template
• Fron Page Templates: Slideshow, Blog, Gallery
• Compatible up to latest version – WP 2.8.x
• Works in all the latest major browsers Firefox V2.5 and up, IE6, IE7 and up, Chrome V1 and up, Safari 4

Be sure to test drive the live demo (theme is located towards the bottom of the homepage) to get a feel for this theme. I think you’ll be quite impressed.

Just released is a new template that streams all your feeds from twitter, youtube, facebook, vimeo etc onto one page.  This template is perfect for anyone who has an extra domain laying around that you want to use as a promotional tool.  Or you can install it on your current site.

Frank is a template for displaying a stream of social activity online. Frank can read, cache, and display all the items and updates in your WordPress, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, and/or any other RSS or Atom feed you throw at it.

Some of Frank’s Features:

• Digest mutliple feeds and display them all in one place.
• Includes eight color schemes to choose from.
• Create a lifestream for yourself, a marketing page, an affiliate page, or collection of content from your favorite sites.
• Broadcast a high visibility Newsflash at the top of your page.
• Custom fonts powered by Cufon.
• Frank is flexible, display one feed or twenty.
• Pagination of items with the ability to set # of items per page.

So how much does Frank cost?  An unbelievable $12.  Go check it out.

If you’ve been blogging for awhile or looking to start up a more professional blog for your business then ultimately you’ll want to invest in a premium blog theme. Premium blog themes offer benefits that free themes do not such as support, admin control panel options, advanced ad features, etc. Since I am a huge fan of wordpress and have been using it for over 4 years now I have come across (I think) almost every premium wordpress developer ever. This isn’t however an exhaustive list because I looked at which developers are still upgrading their themes (to atleast WP 2.8). If I found a developer who’s last blog post was several months ago with no mention of theme upgrades I didn’t include it. There’s no reason for me to promote outdated themes so I excluded them. So here they are, wordpress developers currently producing the best premium themes on the market.

	Thesis stands above all the rest in its advanced features. From layout options, typographic control to built in SEO capabilities Thesis is really a steal at the price. This site is powered by Thesis! Be sure to check out the demo.
	iThemes has been around a long time. They offer a wide array of premium wordpress themes for every type of site imaginable. From corporate themes to themes for photographers iThemes offers something for everyone.
	StudioPress premium themes are perfect for a small business or an individual looking to establish their online presence with WordPress. We offer professional services for internet marketing, search engine optimization, content management, blog and web design.
	Woo Themes have made a name for themselves by offering a large number of high quality premium wordpress themes. You can join their membership club or purchase only one at a time. You’ll be hard-pressed to not find a theme you’re looking for.
	RichWP offers a number of professional themes to choose from. Even though they are new to the theme market they offer themes that are unique and worthy of promotion. Especially unique are their photoblog themes.
	Elegant Themes offers a wide range of themes you can gain access to by joining their club. And for only $20 a year this is one of the cheapest clubs around. Elegant Themes also releases themes on a regular basis so be sure to check them out.
	Gorilla Themes really shines when it comes to producing premium themes for real estate agents. They offer quite possibly the best looking wordpress themes for real estate around. Don’t overlook their other themes though.
	Graph Paper Press offers a wide range of premium wordpress themes. From magazine style themes to themes built specifically for photographers or media producers. A lot of the themes are free as well. Great use of javascript should be mentioned.
	Arthemia is only one of the main themes that Colorlabs produces. Perfect for blogs with a lot of content, If you are running an online magazine or a corporate website, Arthemia Premium might just be the solution you’re looking for.
	Wp Remix makes all you control freaks content with a premium blog theme that is highly customizable. If you’re comfortable with a WYSIWYG editor and want a theme with unlimited ability then check out WP Remix. You won’t be disappointed.
	Theme Galaxy offers 8 premium wordpress themes to choose from. If you’re comfortable editing theme files you might want to take a look at their theme andromeda. If you’re developer these could be the themes for you.
	Unique Blog Designs offers a great niche of premium blog designs for those that are concentrated on earning money from their sites. They really focus on the affiliate marketer and offer a range of themes that don’t disappoint.
	Gabfire Themes offers premium wordpress themes that are perfect if you want to run a magazine style blog or have tons of content. They currently offer 5 different themes to choose from and from the demos you can see that content is what these themes love.
	Zidalgo is a premium wordpress theme vendor that offers 4 premium wordpress themes with clean code. If you can’t find what your looking for from the many other wordpress vendors try them. Definetely worth giving a look.
	Themeshift is run by Simon Rimkus, a German web designer who has been designing wordpress themes since 2007. His designs are very clean and professional looking. What others offer in quantity Simon offers in Quality. Check them out.
	ThemeForest… What’s there to say. If you you haven’t browsed the unique wordpress themes at Themeforest you’re really missing out. Tons of designers and tons of themes. You’re bound to find what you’re looking for here.
	PremiumThemes offers a theme club where for one price you can download and use any theme you like and they create new themes every month. R.Bavesh is the founder and has produced some nice themes to check out.
	SoloStream designs and delivers Premium WordPress Themes that make it easier and more cost effective for small business owners to connect with their customers, make a name for themselves and earn more money.

If you’re a wordpress theme developer developing premium themes and you’re not on this list please don’t hesitate to contact me.