Journey

I’m addicted to WordPress themes, especially Themeforest themes. I have bookmarked 175 themes since I first became a member several years ago. It’s a real problem.. I’m in love with so many of them.. I end up buying them, installing them, spending hours configuring them.. and then, a few weeks later, I like a new one, and so then I install that one, spend hours configuring.. hehe.. it’s just so hard!

And again, this weekend, I’m on the hunt for a new theme for two of my new sites:

1.) an entrepreneur community site (so trying to find something that can display podcasts and nice blog posts, webinars, featured members, photos, videos, as well as have that community feel where people can join up and become really part of the entrepreneur community)

2.) a reputation marketing focused business site (so trying to find something that is very nice and clean looking, and not too “busy”, as well as something that brings that professional feel)

And then there are the themes I found that just “stood out to me” like.. with that pang of “Wow! I love it, but where can I use it?” :)

Here are the themes that are tormenting me this weekend: (in no particular order, as I have no idea how to group them and I love them all for various reasons).  Rather than just list the features of each theme, I’m just going to list what I personally love about each of them.

Squared (Themeforest)

Things I love about it:

1. The homepage looks amazing, so clean and smooth, I love the new type of slider and I love how the slides move seemlessly.
2. I can envision my intro sections for my entrepreneur community site
3. I love how the Recent Work and Our Client areas pull your eyes to it, and I can imagine being able to feature community members, speakers, and recent podcasts, etc in those areas
4. It’s already configured to support BuddyPress – which if you have ever tried to configure BuddyPress for an existing theme, you’ll know what a b*tch it is to do ;) it will save endless hours of banging my head against the wall if I can find a theme that already supports BuddyPress
5. It’s already configured to have a shop, and not that I need a shop on the community site, it couldn’t hurt :)
6. It’s responsive – which means mobile and any other device friendly – whatever size the monitor, it will resize to look really nice in – I’m loving responsive themes right now, since a lot more people are browsing with their mobiles these days.
7. On the negative side – it only has 3 stars on themeforest, which is definitely something to be concerned about – that means out of all the people that voted, a good lot of them voted it down, and you usually only do that if you are really upset with a theme, so there must be something going on there that people are not happy about, which is my only “pause” for concern right now.

• Direct Link to Demo Site
• Squared – Responsive WordPress Theme

Freestyle (Themeforest)

Things I love about it:

1. It’s my absolutely fave theme on the planet right now, I just love every single page – the design is incredible – just love it!
2. I love the blog page, no over-powering large images, the font is fantastic, the way they are organized, plus when you put your mouse over the post, stuff “happens” which will please people who are browsing the site
3. It comes with 5 fully-formatted pages – and I would take days of playing to make something look that great
4. The font, the page design, the colours, the photos they chose.. basically I just can’t wait to use this somewhere, just not sure where I can use it yet.. I think I’ve already convinced myself that it’s not likely the one I will choose for the community membership site, but there is still a possibility to use it for my reputation site.
5. The most amazing choices of shortcodes!

• Direct Link to Demo Site
• Freestyle Responsive WordPress Theme

Momentum (RocketTheme)

Things I love about it:

1. Straight away I could visualize that this would really suit the Entrepreneurs community site – they did their convincing by putting all those snowboarding pics in there (so tip to designers!), straight away I could imagine this theme really fitting in with what I want the community to be about.
2. The design is so crisp, so clean, I love the fonts, I love the borders around text and images, I love the colour options, I love the slider, I love how they still managed to place text high above the fold, even with that massive slideshow – just great
3. Widget control – this theme is so damn flexible when it comes to putting content wherever the heck you want, it’s an absolute dream.
4. Although I love the design and my mouse is hovering over the buy button.. I still have the problem of it not being already buddypress enabled, and since I’ve had no experience with RocketTheme before, I don’t know what their support is like if I can’t figure out how to do it manually.

• Direct Link to Demo Site
• Momentum Responsive WordPress Theme

Salvation & Mingle (Themeforest)

Things I love about them:

1. These 2 themes are made from the same company (Parallelus) and both are designed really well.
2. They are both Buddypress ready and as someone who has already purchased and used Salutation, I’m really a fan of this theme author and I know that they have had the experience to make it really work for BuddyPress, which would help heaps if using it as a community theme. I also have experience with their support forum and have seen them answer every question I’ve ever searched for.
3. As far as the differences between the two, both of them seem to have the same functionality, just a difference in the way they look. Everyone who sees these two themes has the same problem with deciding between the two, but the authors prefer the newer one, Salutation, which is why I got that one the first time.
4. Neither are responsive, but that’s not high-priority for me if it has everything else.. argh, it’s so hard, I don’t know.

• Demo Link for Salutation
• Salutation: WordPress + Buddypress Theme
• Demo Link for Mingle
• Mingle – Multi-purpose WordPress Theme

Tachyon (RocketTheme)

Things I love about it:

1. Honestly I don’t know where to use it but I feel I “need” to buy it (obsessive compulsive much?). It feels like something you would use on maybe this site, or maybe for a WordPress Review site or similar.
2. I love the design, it looks very polished and “finished”
3. There is no blog example, which sucks because I’m really fussy about my blog archive pages.
4. The fonts are fantastic, and again there is lots of options for the widget areas, being able to put whatever you want, whereever you want, is so rare – I’ve never seen so many options before, it’s like spoiling someone really :)
5. It’s buddypress supported (yay) so again, would make a great community site.
6. If I were to buy this one, it would probably be to replace the one I have on this site, my PennyButler.com blog but I don’t think the blog would be able to replace the one on this one somehow AND I shouldn’t be focused on this blog right now when there is 2 sites that “need” to be up asap, so maybe I’ll just bookmark this one for a later time.. but then, I’m still wondering if it would be suitable for the entrepreneur site.. *sigh*..

• Demo Link for Tachyon
• Tachyon WordPress Theme

Well those are the shortlisted themes that I’ve been staring at and can’t decide on, I hope that I’ve given someone else the same agony that I have lol.. nah just kidding, I hope that it’s just because I’ve been going through hundreds of websites and demos this weekend and that I can’t see the obvious choice and that maybe after a good night’s sleep, I’ll just look at one of them and realize it’s the right choice. :)

If you like any of them, please comment below and help me out ! :)
… or if there’s another buddypress theme that you prefer over the one’s that I’ve mentioned, please let me know as well – I’m going stir-crazy trying to figure out which one to do and will have to bite the bullet and make a decision within the next couple of days.. :)

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