Why I Recommend Elegant Themes
I have long recommended the themes over at Elegant Themes to people who want something better than a freebie theme can offer. One of the reasons I recommend them is because of the price, quite frankly. 🙂
Here’s a video to explain…
Last week, I started to put together a new product reviews section on this site. This will be a replacement for the old “Toolbox” page which has been on this site for awhile now.
One of the things I’m going to be doing for this section of the site is having a video to go along with each recommendation. The video will fully explain why I like the product and any pros and cons of note.
See, it is one thing for somebody to just drop a bunch of affiliate links. It is one thing for somebody to pimp anything under the sun just because it pays out a commission. There are too many people who do dishonest product recommendations and lead people astray… and I think it is bullshit.
So, I’m doing something different.
If I’m going to recommend a product to you, I’m going to get on a video and I’m going to tell you straight up what I think of it. You can SEE me talk about it. I want things to be transparent in this regard.
Right now, this reviews section talks about things I recommend. But, who knows… I may very well expand it to things that I DON’T recommend. After all, there is garbage out there, too. And, after 14 years of doing this, I’ve gotten fairly good at differentiating between truly good solutions and things which were obviously just put together to make a few bucks and add no real value.
So, that’s where I’m going with it… and today I’ll start out with…
Elegant Themes
I have long recommended the themes over at Elegant Themes to people who want something better than a freebie theme can offer. One of the reasons I recommend them is because of the price, quite frankly. 🙂
Here’s a video to explain…
Our theme over at PCMech.com is derived from one of their themes, as I show you in the above video.
Now, let me address one thing which I didn’t mention in the video. And that is…
Why aren’t I using a framework like Thesis or Genesis?
The reason is unique to me. See, I’m actually pretty damn adept at HTML, CSS and PHP programming. Hell, back in the day, I actually personally created a content management system to power my tech site which, at the time, rivaled the capability of Wordpress itself.
I’m a nerd. 🙂 Which means I am not only able to hack up my themes any way I please, but I PREFER it. For somebody like me, a framework sorta kinda gets in the way.
I have nothing against Thesis or Genesis and there is still a possibility I’ll move to one of them in the future (because they do bring their own sets of conveniences, to be sure).
Theme frameworks are not really THEMES… they are FRAMEWORKS. That’s why they look so damn basic out of the box. And, unless you know how to customize those solutions quite a bit or hire somebody to do it, you can generally recognize one of those frameworks on first glance.
If you want a great theme right out the gate and money is an issue for you, definitely check out Elegant Themes. You have access to their entire library of themes for one low price.
Hi David,
I do agree with you. So how about PCMech! How much did you sent for design or customization?
Simply put EG is a good value for those that will have the wherewithal to fix the buggy code. I haven’t had one Elegant Theme to work right for me out of the box. If you are looking for something to work out of the box and you have no clue of JS,PHP or HTML don’t use EG. Also the support is pretty much the forum. So no direct help for issues. With all of that being said I have built 20+ sites and landing pages using EG. For me it is the most cost effective and the issue that I come across I am able to fix. Another thing is recently the Elegant Themes crew have been working hard to fix well known bugs and code older themes to be fully responsive. For that reason I will continue to use EG.Tellis
Thanks for the input, Tellis. Yeah, for me, its a “bang for the buck” question. EG wins hands down in that department.
I didn’t find any bugs in the theme I used, but then again, I never intended to use it “out of the box”. I went it and changed it quite a bit.
Hey David,
Wow man, I was about to ask you if you actually were using Elegant Themes somewhere and I wasn’t aware PCMech was using them (just checked its source). Anyway, awesome customization!On the other hand, I’ve bought EG almost like a year ago (still have access) and the plan was to use it for a small site to do site design for local offline businesses using EG themes.
The bad thing is that I found almost all the sliders to be buggy as hell. Asked a few times on the forums to solve the problems and got told that fixking that would need third party coding and was beyond the scope of EG.
The funny bit is that is was within the scope of EG since the basic functionality of the sliders was flawed but it is what it is.
I still think that for so many great looking themes, paying below $40 USD is a steal.
Even if some of the sliders -definitely not making this up, the questions are in the forum- were buggy for us.
Cheers man and looking forward for your upcoming reviews. 😉
Sergio
Thanks for letting folks know. I actually never used the slider that came with TheSource, so I guess I never ran into that one.
No doubt at all. Elegant themes has a lot of good themes. I think their theme also good for seo =)
Truth is, any theme can be made good for SEO. It isn’t the theme, really, that does that. There is some stuff that IS done with the theme (like placement of content toward the top of the DOM), but otherwise, not a super big deal.
I’ve been using Elegant themes for 3 years now. Love them and their tech support is top notch. David, you’re not as dumb as you look. You have good taste. In fact, if you click on my name, it will take you to an elegant theme.
I’m not as dumb as I look. Hmmm…. I guess the world really is ending there, huh? 😉
I found out about Elegant Themes about a week or so ago from a comment in a thread at WishList Insider and will be buying them shortly (being the father of a 3 week old I just haven’t had a chance to get around to setting up my next site yet; sometime this week!) Good to see that you recommend them, I’ll go through your link, I definitely like the look and variety of them combined with the price, that’s for sure.
Yeah, can’t really beat it. Thanks, man. 🙂