Organic Themes Review
Organic Themes is a premium WordPress theme subscription service that offers high-quality professional themes aimed at businesspeople and artists. Overall their service is very impressive, though the price may be a bit high for some developers given that many of their themes are specific to certain niches. There are also currently no video tutorials as far as we can tell, which is another factor which drops our overall score.
Organic Themes Pros
Organic Themes caters to the professional client with themes created for artists and business owners. Their themes have a very strong professional look and feel.Organic Themes Cons
We’d like to see a lot more theme choices at their current price point for their theme subscription.Company Information
Organic Themes is a US-based company created in 2009 which enjoys a lot of traffic, a high PR on Google, and a fair amount of popularity. The company states in their “About” section that the reason they chose the name “Organic Themes” is that they feel it is a reflection of their design process-elegant, simple, impactful themes without extra bells and whistles which may distract from the essential core product.
Licensing Terms
The licensing terms are definitely a great aspect of Organic Themes. For one startup price of $249.00, you receive all of the themes the company has created, as well as all future themes, theme updates, design files, and access to the support forums. There are no annual, monthly, or other recurring fees. Since there are only 18 paid themes right now and updates are released every other month or so on average, the price per theme is rather high at this point at $13.38. Then again, this is access to lifetime themes and updates, so over the long term it could end up being a great value. A lot will depend no how active this company is in the future.
Theme Quality
Theme quality is quite high, and the themes are named for their recommended usage, for example, “Magazine Theme,” “Studio Theme,” “Photographer Theme,” “Music Theme,” “Business Theme,” and so forth. As you can see, many of these are niche products aimed at artists and designers. There aren’t as many generic themes or themes for businesses, which is a bit of a drawback, but for people in the art community these themes are top notch and offer a great way to showcase creations.
Theme Options
Organic Themes provides the usual theme options-you can modify the headers and footers, select a custom menu with special options, add widgets, featured images, featured videos, and change the site colors and so on. Organic Themes also has a unique feature wherein they have partnered with a company called WerkPress which can provide advanced customization if you require something beyond the scope of the tools you are given. You fill out a form on the website to get in touch with the company about their services. Fees are not listed on the site, and presumably depend on what you need and how difficult it will be to achieve. There is a drop-down box that asks you to describe your budget-you’ll notice the lowest price bracket is “$500 or less,” so this is probably a pretty expensive service. Still, it’s yet another option you’re given.
Overall Value
As mentioned previously, the support options are good in general (full documentation, support forum, email and ticketing systems, updates blog, and social networking), but there is a lack of video tutorials. Text-based tutorials with images are included, and they are pretty comprehensive, but videos can save time and make things easier to understand when it comes to WordPress development. We’d like to see a wider variety of themes for non-artists, and it’d be great if the price per theme would drop a bit, but if the company continues to expand that’s exactly what’s going to happen.