Elegantthemes.com Review

I’ve decided in the coming month we will be reviewing some of the more well known Wordpress Themes and clubs. I’ve already reviewed the Thesis Theme, so now its time to take a look at Elegant Themes. If you want to take a peek at their site before reading on, just click here (opens in new window).  As with all my reviews, this will not feature affiliate links, so you can relax in the knowledge I have nothing to gain by going one way or the other.

ElegantThemes.com – What am I getting?

Elegant Themes is a membership site, so you are paying for yearly access to all the themes. New themes are regularly added. The price is only $19.99 a year, paid by Paypal. There are currently 39 themes available for download. In addition to the themes, you get full access to the photoshop files for the themes, and a photoshop file for the logo itself.

Quality of the themes

The quality of some of his latest releases is nothing short of amazing.  Take a look at Personal Press, Glow Theme and Lumin as an example of what Elegantthemes.com can do. I love the way the thumbnail images are framed on Personal Press. Its extremely user friendly too, as you just upload whatever image you want, tag it as “Thumbnail” and the theme will resize it for you and frame it.

If you take a look at Glow and Lumin, you will see the impressive sliders with featured posts. These are extremely easy to set up from the admin area – again the themes will automatically resize your images for the featured part. You just need to select what category of posts you want to use for the sliders. You can also modify the slider speed, and set whether it should rotate through them automatically (which I would always recommend activating, I think it looks a lot more professional).

Are they good for SEO?

If you’re reading my blog in the first place, then you obviously have an interested not only in pretty sites, but making them rank. Elegant Themes have some SEO options built in, such as changing page titles, meta tags etc on a page by page basis. This is obviously nothing that you couldn’t do with external plugins, but certainly nice to have it baked into the theme. One less thing to worry about that could break or need updating etc.

Admin Panel – Any good?

All of the ElegantThemes.com themes work from the same layout of admin area, called the “epanel”. Once you have used one, you have used them all which is great from a time saving point of view.

Its a simple task to click on the tabs, edit your options and make alterations to your site. The epanel might take you 20 minutes to get used to as its certainly different from most other admin areas but once you pick it up its very quick to use to make changes to your site that in a lot of other templates would involve editing php.

There is options to add code to the header or footer, which would be ideal for adding your tracking codes.

I couldn’t take a larger screenshot on this small laptop, but on that screen you can use the visualizer to see exactly what colours you want, then simple scroll down and paste the colour code into boxes. So you can change the colours of pretty much everything from inside the admin panel.

Another part I love is the ability to turn on/off Author, Date, Categories, Comments – in too many themes you need to go digging in the source code to comment them out. No such problem here. You can also alter the settings for Thumbnails and choose whether you also want them added to individual posts or not (tip: enable this! Looks so much better). If you know you don’t want comments on the site, you can also kill them from every post with one click here too.

Support – is it included?

You get full access to a support forum while you remain a member.  The forum is broken down into a sub forum for each theme.  The themes are pretty easy to use out of the box, so to be honest I’ve not really ventured into the forum much. For the purpose of this review I’ve just taken a look, and some people seem to be asking questions about how to do very specific edits, and moderators are really going out their way to help – usually creating and posting the exact code they need to change. The support looks very impressive.

Is it worth the money?

Without doubt, Elegant Themes is the most underpriced theme package you can buy.  Its unreal to think if you sign up now you would be getting all the themes for 50 cents each, plus whatever else is released in the next year. At $20 a year, its a bargain. At $200 a year, I’d say the same.

I honestly think their price point is too low to make their affiliate program effective. They do have an affiliate scheme with a 50% payout (again I want to point out this review doesn’t use affil links). 50% is higher than industry average, but 50% of $20 is still only $10. It’s far more profitable for webmasters to promote Woo Themes or Thesis (Which are both still great themes/packages) than it is to promote the Elegant ones.

Conclusion

If you are working with Wordpress in any way whatsoever, you need to spend $20 and pick these templates up.  My blog seems to be getting known for scathing reviews, and since I refuse to use affiliate links I just tell it like it is. If I had used affil links in this post, I’d almost be embarrassed to hit the “Publish” button since its definitely the most positive review I’ve done so far

I’m trying to think of a negative point to finish off with, and pretty much the only one I can come up with is in comparison to some of his newer templates,  the first 5 he released are looking a bit dated. But hell, just ignore those 5 and you’re getting 34 templates for a bargain price. Not even like they are bad templates, they have just became a victim of the success of his later (more) awesome stuff.

If you want to check them out, click here to visit. Any questions feel free to post them and I’ll do my best to answer.