Elegant Themes

“Beautiful Premium WordPress Themes” is how Elegant Themes describes their designs. They don’t lie.

(Elegant Themes is one of two theme design companies I rely on — the other is StudioPress. Because I like and trust their themes, I’ve joined with them as an affiliate. That means, if you purchase a theme from a link on this site, I earn a commission. It allows me offer my WordPress setup services at such low rates.)

Currently offering 87 themes, it’s obvious that design is very important to them. In fact the company founder, Nick Roach, was a design student in college when he created his first WordPress theme — and until July, 2013, he was the company’s only designer.

Elegant and my other go-to designer, StudioPress, were recently declared co-winners in a review of major theme designers. According to the reviewer, “Both companies offer consistently reliable products that take the hassle out of setting up and using a WordPress theme.”

Pricing

Elegant Themes charges you one annual fee for a personal membership that allows you to use any (or all) of their themes on as many sites as you own or control. At $69/year, that works out to about 79 cents per theme. Even if you’re only going to use one, that’s still a pretty good price.

For $20 more, you can sign up for the Developer Package, which includes all their Plugins and Photoshop Files.

There’s also a one-time purchase option. Spring for $249 and you get lifetime access to everything.

You also get upgrades and ongoing support for as long as you’re a member.

Appearance

Elegant was one of the winners in the review’s aesthetics category. Their themes are visually appealing, and they stay on top of current design trends. All of their newer themes are mobile responsive.

Security

Rock-solid code and top security practices are a big reason why I use and promote Elegant Themes. They offer:

• Best practices for WordPress coding
• W3C that’s the World Wide Web Consortium — they decide on international standards for websites
• Respected internet security companies like Sucuri audit their themes regularly to look for any possible security issues.

Compatible with the Major Browsers

Some themes display beautifully in Firefox, but look a mess in Internet Explorer (or vice versa). That’s because not all browsers comply with all of the W3C standards. Elegant Themes is compatible with all the major browsers, including:

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Internet Explorer
• Opera
• and a few others

Choice of Colors and Fonts

Elegant Themes makes it super easy to change the color of almost any element of the site. They offer a set of preset color schemes — these are your choices in the Foxy theme.

Or you can customize each element yourself.

You can also choose the fonts (type styles) you want to use on your site. Unfortunately, Elegant Themes doesn’t give you an easy way to change the font size — my only real beef with them. I find most of their fonts too small and too lightly colored to be very readable. Since baby boomers are a large segment of the web-browsing population, they should make it easier to create sites that people over the age of 25 can read easily.

Shortcodes

Shortcodes act almost like a plugin, but you can put them anywhere. When you insert a shortcode into your post or page, you can style a quotation, making it stand out from the page. Or create columns, add a slider, insert an author box or a button . . .

Shortcodes call on programming that’s already present in the theme.

Easily Customize Layout and Navigation

Every Elegant Themes theme includes an ePanel where you can easily customize navigation, layout, colors, SEO, and even advertising.

Visit the Elegant Themes website.