I’m happy to announce the release of our 8th theme already - Fresh News! You can find all the information you need on the theme right here.

And then for those of you that missed the newsletter: our themes are WP2.5-compatible and you don’t require any updates / fixes from our side. So you can upgrade to the new version of WP - which is super-great - anytime and continue to experience the joy of working with our themes.

I’d like to present to you, our most feature-packed themes to date: The Live Wire Series! We spent a considerable amount of time to perfect the design and incorporate some new (and some innovative) features, which we hope will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with WordPress.

I worked with Mark Forrester on these themes, as he was the lead creative “director” for this project. And except for the new features, we’ve also designed 3 different “styles” for the range, which we hope will cater to a wider variety of customers. Both Mark and I are very happy with how the theme came out in the end and we will soon be updating our older themes with the same features. But for the time-being, the Live Wire themes will be the trendsetters in this regard and you can be assured of only the best when you purchase this theme!

For more reading head over here:

• “Live Wire - A Premium WordPress Theme” by Mark Forrester
• “Live Wire is Here!” by Adii

After a few hectic days of development and bug fixing, we’re proud to announce two new theme releases, as well as an exclusive plugin addition… We’ve just released Flash News and The Gazette Edition, which are collaborations with Magnus Jepson and Mark Forrester respectively.

I’ve also teamed up with WordPress plugin guru, Joost de Valk, to release a top-notch little SEO add-on for the Premium News themes, which should increase your SEO capabilities significantly. The plugin is exclusive to Premium News themes and slots in effortlessly to our integrated theme options backend.

On another note, we’ve decided to remove the “Get More Themes” option for now,  as we feel we weren’t maximizing value from future themes. Current subscribers will still receive the future themes as previously described, but we will not accept any new subscribers.

Anyway, after a long, long weekend of early hours and IE browser incompatibilities, I’m off to a bit of rest… Check out the new themes and us know what you think!

I’m working on two new Premium News designs (FlashPress & Untitled) with some other designers and in return for your feedback, I’m running a competition for the most valuable comments. So shoot on over to my blog, give some input and stand in line to win some great prizes!

I would not say that the flood gates has opened for new Premium WordPress themes (yet anyway), but the competition sure is coming thick and fast. Usually I don’t take too much notice of new themes, as I feel that I’ve established myself as a Premium theme developer and ultimately I won’t change too many things with regards to my business model (unless need be).

So this morning I stumbled across Quommunication’s new premium offering, simply called News (live preview). Now having previously interviewed the designer of the theme - Bence Kucsan - I’m very familiar with his style and I’d go as far as saying that I absolutely love his work. Now the basis of any opinion that I might have of the theme, would be focussed on the fact that Bence is an extremely popular and well-established designer - which suggests that he could come into the Premium theme market and make his presence felt. This opinion is thus based on the fact that I really respect Bence’s work - yet I do not feel threatened by his entry into the market.

Why would I not feel threatened, when I’ve basically waxed lyrical about his design skills?

Well, even though Quommunication News looks great, I simply feel that it lacks a bit of punch and the theme doesn’t necessarily distinguish himself from the other themes available at the moment. To explain the distinguishing-factor, consider that when I first released the original Premium News, only Brian Gardner’s Revolution Themes were available - and what I did with Premium News was to offer a different look and a different set of features to Brian’s themes.

Furthermore, I think the overly minimalistic style of the theme (it doesn’t contain one single image file - just pure CSS) will prohibit the theme from reaching its full sales potential. I believe that buyers want something that’s easy to customize, but they’re only going to buy a premium theme if it looks slick and stylish - something which Bence’s theme seems to be lacking. Again, to the trained eye of a designer, the style is fantastic (I love it for example) - but users / potential buyer needs to be educated about these kind of things or they need to be blown away with the interface & back end features.

In terms of functions, I also feel that News is lacking a bit - but then again, with Premium News & NewsPress’ integrated theme options, I do believe that I’ve got an unique offering and selling point. Not many other premium themes has adopted this approach thus far and judging by my sales, this must be a competitive advantage.

But irrespective of my opinion with regards to the potential sales / popularity of this theme, it’s great to see that established designers are entering the market, as this will surely keep myself, Brian and all the other market players on our toes and push us to deliver better products to the community. I’m pretty excited to see where this will go… Aren’t you?

Just a quick note to apologize to all of you that have been looking for the Support Forums or tried to purchase a theme in the last few days… As some of might’ve noted from my blog - our web servers crashed last week and we’ve been recovering the data since then.

The Support Forums should be online in the next day or two (still trying to figure out and unexplained error), whilst our payment function should be back online ASAP. If you have any questions at this stage, please don’t hesitate to drop me an e-mail on adii {at} adii {dot} co {dot} za and I will respond in kind.