My WooThemes Review

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As WordPress becomes the de facto standard of web publishing, the need for quality WordPress themes have soared. There are lots of themes vendors across the web but I finally made up my mind to go with WooThemes and signed up a $125 membership with them a few months back. I never looked back. Here are the things I like or don’t like about them off the top of my head.

Good things

1. Some of the themes look so fantastic and unique! Their themes are much more than just blogs.
2. They retire old themes that went out of fashion. This means they are very picky of what they offer. When I first signed up, it’s about 125 themes in their repository but recently it has been downsized to 100.
3. They UPDATE. I log back in my account at WooThemes.com every a few days and the version numbers of the themes change very frequently. Many old themes have been regularly updated and patched since being released more than 2 years ago.
4. They release new themes every month. While it’s not as exactly as 2 themes per month as they promise, it’s approximately in that pace. And the latest ones are the best.
5. They have very sophisticated yet easy to use backend configuration panels for every theme. Each of them comes with hundreds of different options regarding a variety of aspects. The administration is quite enjoyable.
   
6. They reply to EVERY THREAD in their member community with usable advice and sensible solutions in less than 24 hours. Sometimes it takes longer for advanced questions that would be assigned to a senior support staff. I asked a total of 16 questions at their community forum and all of them got resolved in less than 48 hours with clear, detailed and professional answers. I actually become better with WordPress (know many useful plugins that make my life easier writing for the web) since I started participating in their forums.
7. As an intermediate web programmer myself, from viewing their code base and from the answers to my questions, I can tell they have designed their products (themes, theme framework and WooCommerce) well. It’s not a novice-work that’s pieced together and then duplicated over and over again. What they make is a well-formed ecosystem that’s capable of forgiving and extending. It’s both robustly functioning and beautifully usable.
8. Very great value for money. With this coupon code:
   $25 OFF STANDARD MEMBERSHIP OR $40 OFF DEVELOPER MEMBERSHIP

   WOO2011

   Click To Open/Copy
   
   You would only need to pay $100 (with $25 OFF, or $40 OFF for developer membership) for a standard membership that instantly enables you to download ALL of their current themes for a month. And subsequent subscription is just $20 per month that you can choose to deactivate or re-activate any time you want without any additional charges.

Not so good things

1. About 1/2 of the themes don’t look that good, especially old ones. This is probably because they have designed their website so beautiful that I have high expectations from their products and become too easy to be disappointed by their themes.
2. I tried to think of things I don’t like about them for the last hour…….and I couldn’t think of any, except one time I asked a question about the product image resizing issue for one of their WooCommerce themes and got replies that insisted it was my problem rather than theirs. They turned out to be right. It was my problem because I was not familiar with the WooCommerce options. But still. If a user can be blamed for incompetence to use the software, it’s a developer fail without excuses.

Conclusion

To sum up, I give 4.8 / 5 to WooThemes. Go with them, if WordPress is your core publishing platform. Period. With WooCommerce and their e-Commerce themes, WordPress can be a very powerful online store as well. Being a member of them would make sure you stay on the decisive edge of web design trends for your web projects.