Review of ThemeForest Theme MarketPlace

Many of the themes we list in our front page round up are for sale through ThemeForest, one of the most popular WordPress theme marketplaces. You can see a list of all the theme forest themes we list below. There are some important things you should know about ThemeForest before buying there.

Beautifully Designed WordPress Themes!

First, we think ThemeForest offers some of the most cutting edge designs available anywhere in the WordPress universe. Everytime we visit, we just shake our heads in awe at the beauty and creativity of the designs there – both photography WordPress themes and themes for any other purposes.

Individual Designers Rather Than a Single Company

One reason ThemeForest out-designs many other WordPress theme shops is because, well, because Themeforest is hundreds of individual designers and developers. What you are looking at is NOT a set of themes designed by ThemeForest. You are looking at themes designed and developed by hundreds of independent design and web development professionals, the best of which have been accepted into the ThemeForest marketplace.

Support and Quality Vary – You Don’t Know What You Are Going to Get

Because the themes offered for sale are put there by independent designers, you won’t get theme support, help, refunds, service, or anything else from ThemeForest. You need to find and contact that individual developers. Some offer support in ThemeForest forums. Some offer support in their own forums. Some barely offer any support or follow up assistance at all.

So when you look at the themes below, do a bit of checking for how the developer of the theme offers support. W

We’ve picked the photography themes we like the most from a design perspective, but we have not used all of them, and we haven’t confirmed the support quality that’s offered. That’s some due diligence you’ll want to do on your own.

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Pixel Happy – A Great Single Column PhotoBlog Theme

Pixel Happy is a well-designed, fun photo blogging WordPress theme. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the website you are currently viewing is based on Pixel Happy. It suited our purpose perfectly since we were looking for a theme that really looked like a one-column photo blog.

This theme is based on the Genesis framework by StudioPress, a popular and exceedingly well crafted “framework” for WordPress themes. One thing you should know in advance is that to use Pixel Happy you need to buy BOTH Genesis (the underlying framework) and Pixel Happy (which is a “child” theme that sits on top of that framework).

You should also be aware that like all Genesis/StudioPress theme, this theme lacks true gallery management. You can’t upload and manage galleries of images, at least not beyond the built-in image functionality for galleries (which is not impressive). This is the kind of theme where you upload images individually in groups, display them in a standard way, and that’s about it.

So if you have galleries in mind, you may want to consider using a gallery plugin for WordPress.

Despite it’s limitations, it’s great for the right purpose. We’ve been very happy with it for our purposes here.

WordPress for Photographers

Landscape WordPress Theme by StudioPress – the Good and Bad

Landscape is a fairly straightforward and classic WordPress theme designed for photographers. Like many of the most popular photography website templates out there, it’s got a single large showcase image on the home page. There are some strong points and weak points to this theme.

On the strong side, it’s built on the Genesis framework by StudioPress. Genesis is one of the dominant WordPress theme frameworks. It’s extremely well developed and stable. It’s used by a lot of big players. If you go with this option, you know you are getting one well-built photo WordPress theme.

One the weak side, you should be aware that this theme does NOT have true gallery management. You have to create a post for for each image, and what look like galleries are actually lists of posts. As a photographer, that means you can’t batch up load a bunch of images into a gallery, rearrange them, edit meta data, or do any of the things you may well want to do on your website.

StudioPress WordPress Theme