Do you remember last January, a big buzz spreading in WordPress community? Small Potato had just launched his 5$ Theme club. In a nutshell, a ridiculous amount of money for a bunch of Premium themes from one of the most famous WordPress designers around. Well 10 months have passed, but Theme clubs have become something more and more popular. It is now time for an overview of the best of them.

1. WPDesigner 5$ Theme Club

I first spoke about WPDesigner as he was the first to introduce the idea. After a few weeks he even launched a big campaign to give away 20 000 club accountsfor free. It turned out to be a big success and the first themes he published definitely worthed the 5 dollars. However in March Small Potato sold his website, and since then no new article was posted, and nobody heard about new themes releases for club members. I personally regret to see such a great website go away like that but we can still hope that the new owner will give us a sign some day…

Speaking of that, if you  spent 5 $ and became a member of this club, Small Potato started refunding everybody as he promised. No doubt now that he was and still stays trustworthy and should be respected among WordPress community. It is a pity we cannot say the same about the new owner of WPdesigner…

 

 

2. Woo Themes Club

 

Woo Themes club was created by Adii in July of this year and proposes Premium like themes for different prices. You can either buy one of them individually or become a club member and get themes, support and source files. However the prices are a bit higher than Small Potato’s 5 bucks: you will spend 250$ for a 6-month single membership. But the themes are really advanced, I invite you to have a look for yourselves, some of them could be interesting.

 

 

 

 

3. Theme Hybrid club

This Theme club was launched by Justin Tadlock in August and makes good use of the Child themes (if you are not clear with these ones, go have a look at Themeshaper’s post about it). The result can be compared to the Woo Themes, although there is a free membership option.

 

 

 

 

4.  Elegant Themes

Elegant Themes also started this year and delivers great themes for a much cheaper price than most of the other theme clubs. The latest one, Studio Blue, has been reviewed on WP-Candy and it shows well the high quality of these themes. Like most of the Premium themes released lately it makes great use of theme options.

 

To conclude all these theme clubs are one good option to choose between a bunch of great quality WordPress, for a reasonable price. If you consider buying a Premium theme you should definitely have a look at these websites and consider all the offers. By the way if you know any other theme club do ot hesitate to let me know in the comments!

 

 

 

5. Now there’s more…

 

Now that said, what about other opportunities, and the future of all this theme club market? Indeed the Premium themes themselves do not fit much with the Open source model of WordPress. It has been criticized many times, and there seems to be something coming up to shake up the whole Premium marketin November (dixit Matt). This has been announced by the very same person who started the whole Premium WordPress theme idea, Brian Gardner. In the beginning of October he announced that his Revolution theme club would end. Along with that breaking news we also got to know that he will work on a totally new conceptwith Jason Schuller, who runs WP Elements. Well that sounds promising I cannot wait to see what is coming for us, but seeing who are the 2 men behind this idea I expect some great changes to help WordPress expanding!

What do you think of this idea? What are your opinions about the future of WordPress themes?