Elegant Themes & Forums: You Don’t Have a Compatible Theme!?

Today, I was setting up a new WordPress website that is a forum. 

I decided to use the bbPress plugin for the forums, and then began looking for a nice theme for the website, that has bbPress support.

The reason for this is that if a given theme doesn’t have bbPress support, the bbPress content won’t be styled up like the rest of the website, meaning the developer (in this case, me) will have to create custom CSS styling. Also, since I would be using a theme, I would have the task of implementing styles that fit that theme well. While this isn’t that tall of a task, it’s a waste of time in my book, because I can find a theme with bbPress support, and completely skip all of this extra work, and focus on the important part: making the forum as good as possible to provide valuable content to the visitors, and to also focus on building the forum community, and marketing the forums.

I stopped by Elegant Themes to see what they had to offer, but after looking through their 80+ themes, I was unable to find a single theme which looked like a forum, or was specifically tagged as a forum based theme. Also, there was no mention of bbPress support anywhere. I decided to contact Elegant Themes, and ask them directly if any of their themes had bbPress support. A few hours later, their reply came, and I was disappointed.

Elegant Themes does not have a single forum based theme, or any themes with bbPress, or other forum plugin, support.

This really blows my mind, since Elegant Themes doesn’t offer single purchases of their themes, and offers all 80+ themes for a yearly subscription price. I’m not saying that isn’t a good value, however, if you’re marketing a theme subscription to be a one stop shop for themes for any type of website, not having a single theme based on a forum site is really missing the mark, in my opinion.

Even if there was only one theme that was forum based, it shouldn’t be that big of a deal to a popular theme developer like Elegant Themes to build at least one theme with bbPress support, or create their own forum platform, or, if I was them, a theme with support for all of the most popular forum plugins, so that a customer wishing to setup a forum website could use the theme, and decide for themselves which forum plugin was best for them. I would even take it a step further and have at least one theme with support for BuddyPress, as it’s gained huge popularity, and social is very popular right now.

I don’t really mean to bad mouth Elegant Themes, but for instance, their affiliate program boasts that it pays out over $1,000,000 per year to 21,000+ affiliates. If your business is paying it’s affiliates over a million bucks a year, you would think you could spend the time and money to develop a few themes that support popular platforms like bbPress and BuddyPress.

Take into consideration the fact that standalone, one person development ventures on ThemeForest develop themes with bbPress and BuddyPress support. Some even specialize in these platforms, and virtually all of the themes they develop have support for these popular plugins, and more, built right in.

If I was the CEO of Elegant Themes, I would have my own premium forum plugin as part of the subscription plan that includes their premium plugins, along with their premium themes, and perhaps even a social platform plugin. At the very least, there would be support for bbPress and BuddyPress, if nothing else.

Think of how many people out there don’t purchase an Elegant Themes subscription because of this, or, have an Elegant Themes subscription, but then have to go elsewhere to purchase a premium WordPress theme or plugin, or both, to handle a forum based WordPress site.

Premium WordPress Themes: Subscription Versus Single Purchase

If you’re in the market for a premium WordPress theme, or are “in the market” selling premium WordPress themes, there are two popular methods of offering a theme for purchase.

The first, and most popular method, is presenting the theme as a single purchase product, licensing the purchaser to use the theme in accordance with that license. The license may limit use of the theme to one website, or it may allow unlimited usage by the customer on as many websites as they like.

The second method, which is becoming more popular, is to offer a monthly subscription price, and granting usage rights to the subscriber for any theme included in the subscription.

Depending upon your needs, you’ll need to decide which of these approaches will work best for you.

In my experience, purchasing a single theme is the way to go if you are a niche website and find a premium WordPress theme specifically for your niche. For instance, if you’re a night club, and find a great night club theme, it would make sense to go with that theme, rather than purchasing some other premium theme or collection of themes, and then trying to bend that theme to your specific needs. I’m not saying this can’t be done, or won’t yield good results if done right, however, if you want to spend less time and money on development, using a quality theme specifically for your industry makes a lot of sense.

If you own various websites, and want them all to have a professional look, and they reside in various niches or areas of industry, then a subscription may be right for you. Believe it or not, many times the monthly subscription price is approximately equal to the average cost of a single premium theme. The only catch is, you’ll have to pay that monthly subscription each month to continue using your subscribed to premium themes. The monthly fee is one area which usually deters many single website owners from signing up for a theme subscription.

Money is always an issue, so let’s make some quick considerations for typical situations. If you’re the owner of a single site, purchasing a single theme makes the most sense. You’ll pay a one time fee for a theme, and if you decide that you want to move to a different theme later on, you’ll only have to pay another one time fee, and you’re done.

If you own various websites, a theme subscription website is a great solution, for the short term. Consider, however, that 3 years from now, you’ll still be forking out $39, or $49, or whatever the monthly subscription price is. Total up all of those fees, and you’ll quickly see that you could just as easily purchase a single premium theme for each site in your portfolio and save money. The catch is that you might not have enough cash to afford a premium theme for all of your sites up front, and you don’t want to rely on free themes. That’s perfectly understandable, so I would suggest getting a theme subscription, and slowly replacing your themes with single purchased premium themes. I would do this in the order of importance of the sites you own.

Consider the focus of each site, and honestly evaluate how it is coming along as far as fulfilling it’s potential. Perhaps the site is doing very well, or you may have discovered that the potential audience just isn’t interested in your topic, or, perhaps you lose passion to maintain a certain site. Be honest with yourself before purchasing a premium theme for a specific site. Pick a few sites that are doing very well, and that you are passionate about, and know you will be maintaining for months or years to come, and one by one, purchase premium themes for these sites, while using your theme subscription for the rest of your sites.

Undoubtedly, if you regularly purchase domains and setup new websites, the theme subscription will still be a relevant service to pay for, however, one by one, you’ll be getting a more specialized theme up and running on your most successful sites.

The idea is to maintain this approach until you’ve gotten premium themes on all of your successful sites.

The choice then is whether or not the theme subscription is still needed. I would consider the sites that I was still using themes from the subscription on, and honestly ask myself if the need was still there for a premium theme. If so, I would simply buy a premium theme for that site and put it on my list of sites to work hard to bring up to par in the success column.

The fact of the matter is, if the site isn’t achieving it’s intended purpose, and / or isn’t turning a profit, continually spending money on it doesn’t make sense. In fact, I would say the best thing to do in that case would be to either cut that project, or put some deep thought into how to turn the site around.

There is definitely value in theme subscription sites, however, I look at these marketplaces as a temporary fix. Utilizing them to improve the theme on a number of websites all at once is very useful, however, over time, the amount of money invested just doesn’t jive when considering that you could purchase another equally good theme for a one time fee, and it will probably be more specific to your niche or industry.

From a seller standpoint, I understand the theme subscription business model, however, at the end of the day, I think single theme sales will always trump subscription based businesses, simply because eventually, the customer will stop paying for their subscription, and when they do, all of their websites which were using those themes have to find a new theme. This is a terrible situation for the customer, especially given the fact that they’ve paid you for months, or perhaps even years, for those themes.

One thing I have not seen from a theme subscription marketplace yet is a customer loyalty bonus. The idea of this would be to award subscribers for their business, and not leave them in the above stated situation. I believe this would also greatly improve customer retention, as well as sales conversions. Let’s say for every 3 months that a subscriber pays their fee, they can choose one premium theme from the set of offered themes to be marked as “purchased” the same way a single theme license is done. This means the customer would have a permanent license to a theme of their choice for every 3 months that they continued using the subscription service.

Given this setup, I would be much more likely to use a theme subscription service, and I would use it for much longer, probably. The customer loyalty program would resolve the main drawbacks I have to using theme subscription marketplaces.