As you might have heard, there’s been a lot of discussion lately about premium wordpress themes and whether there here to stay. Seeing lots of popular theme designers like Brain Garner and Adii (and maybe even, Michael Pollock?) jump start the market with popular magazine style layouts (which seems to be the “in” thing now), dozens of other theme designers are now hopping on the bandwagon trying to cash in a few dollars of their own too.

Even then, those “premium” wordpress themes sold by well known theme designers for around $50 up to $200 are a steal compared to those outside of the wordpress community but let’s not even jump into that topic.

What I’m trying to say is that with more and more wordpress theme designers filling up their portfolio with premium wordpress themes, the meaning of premium starts to become very questionable.

So what does premium actually stand for?

• It can mean that your getting a much more quality designed themed compared to those in the general public.
• It can mean that you’ll receive top notch support for your theme.
• It can mean that your getting a more featured packed theme than the typical “widget ready” (which isn’t a freak’n featured! That should be a requirement since it’s built into the wordpress core)
• It can mean that you’re getting a highly customizable theme that even stands out from others of its kind.
• or it can just mean that you’re willing to pay for a theme just because it has “premium” sugar coated on it and you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.

So now that we covered what premium actually means along with my small rant about widgets, let’s talk about the bad news.The term, premium coined around the wordpress community is very subjective. It can mean something for one person, and something totally different to another.

Your job as a blogger (or premium theme buyer) is to know how to distinguish the difference between all the various types of “premium” before you might possibly get ripped off or disappointed. Small Potato from wpdesigner covers this very throughout in his post, premium buying tips.

Now I know that this market is fairly new and all, but its getting crowded very fast so there needs to be some sort of standard that premium theme designers need to obide by. For example, have some level of premium status or standard features that come out of the box in order for it to be even considered something of premium? Right now, the market just seems so random as far as what you get when purchasing your theme and that’s bound not to end up to anything good.

I’ll end it with this: I can assure you that once wordpress theme designers stop looking at wordpress as just a personal publishing platform (which technically it is), they’ll really start making some truly premium themes that’ll be worth the premium price tag. I already have a few ideas of my own as far as innovative things (and features) that can be done with WordPress that you don’t see anywhere around the community.

UPDATE: Jason DeVelvis from the comments has a very similar article about what makes a premium theme premium.

For further reading, check out some other blogs who are talking about this:

• Raising Personal Standard for Paid WordPress Themes - Small Potato
• Basic Theme Requirements - WP Fun
• Premium Wordpress Themes - Nathan Rice
• Premium Themes Plugins - Vandelay Design
• Best Premium Wordpress Themes Gallery - Hack Wordpress
• What Makes A Wordpress Theme Premium - Weblog Tools Collection