I am a simple blogger, who switched from Joomla to Wordpress about a year ago because I spent too much time on the backend. I prefer to focus on my writing. Where Joomla is too complicated Wordpress lacks more than it should and I find myself looking for a suitable theme.

I like the 2012 theme, but is a bit boring, 2013 is nice but way too wild, too much time needed to finetune it too my liking. So I found a free (accidentally) theme I absolutely fell in love with - unfortunately it is one column only - While playing around with it and pondering whether or not to buy one of two other themes from the developer I noticed there was no styling for the text in the categories, basically ruining the template, so I did not buy his template.

Because WP is rather limited you need to define beforehand what you want. I got a pretty good idea but while browsing through numerous templates I noticed that most of the templates rely heavily on a single image, one that somebody who buys the template will most likely replace. I also noticed that most templates are created by people who know little about design, think fonts and colours for instance and more often than not templates are not designed with the user's needs in mind but are ruled by what is fashionable. A couple of years ago every website desperately needed a poll, nowadays it looks like big, big images are all the rage. Most people do not own many of those images but still that is the kind of template that gets turned out by the dozens. Take away the sample image and the design crumbles.

If you don't believe look at how most templates are showcased, a small image in a grid, where the only thing to make it stand out is the image. Of course you can browse the accompanying text but that is about as informative a Google press release.

I tested lots of free templates, including some very popular ones. I know free templates are often meant as showcase - for the premium templates but the errors and omissions are to silly for words. One template had a black background, you could change the colour, the transparency, almost anything. Unfortunately the designer forgot one little thing, the option to change the menu font colour as well. I changed the black background to white and it took me a while to figure out where the menu had gone.

Personally I think the gap between graphic designer and programmer is too wide and there is very little attention for the commercial aspects of premium templates.

I understand that producers have to come up with something new every so often but for users content still rules. Me, and with me most people do not want to switch templates every few months. Even though my site is about its content, content only sells when it is presented nicely. The good news is that it means I am willing to pay for a template, the bad news is that I haven't found what I want yet. Most of it is simply amateurish and not worth the money. It has to be an improvement over the existing basic WP templates.

If you wanna sell templates think what your customer wants rather than what you like. Learn about how colours combine, typography, understand people's workflow and pamper them.

Think for your customer. What plugins might be useful? Add a number of variations on the theme, colours, font, basic lay-outs, translations into other languages, various sets of buttons and symbols but above all don't be the one who makes yet another variation on a theme, especially if the theme wasn't that great in the first place.

As for those prices going up? I don't think so, Most people are happy with the default templates WP provides. As long as those get wilder and wilder, the industry can count its blessings, but once WP returns to creating decent templates its doomed.

It reminds me of a psychology experiment. Two groups of students were given either a pen or a mug, both worth the same, say 5 dollars. Asked if the want to swap, most students said no, simply because it was theirs they valued it higher than what the other had to offer. The same thing happens when people design templates, it is their baby, they worked hard for it but buyers do not value the finished product as much as the designer does.