Theme Wars, Themes for Your Blog
Users vote on their favorite Theme for WordPress and the one with the most votes wins
Who doesn’t like being fought over? Yeah, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t at least secretly like it. That’s one of the reasons the commercials about auto insurance fighting over your business did so well for so long. It plays to our sense of feeling important and loved (in a very strange sort of way when it comes to insurance companies).
Theme Wars is a community of blog designers and bloggers with a Weekly War – a contest to design a particular type of theme as voted in by the community the previous week. Any blog designer can submit their original design entry into the “Weekly War”. Theme Wars Unique Blog Designs decided to take the competition over us to the blogging world and launched Theme Wars. The basic gist of the Theme Wars site is pitting two blog designs against each other for a week long period. Users vote on their favorite and the one with the most votes wins. Pretty simple.
Every week there will be a “Weekly War” between two themes is their feature.
Theme Wars isn’t your ordinary WordPress theme store. It brings together the community, both blog designers and bloggers, who need a design. Here is how it works:
1. Each week, any blog designer can submit an entry (his/her original design) into the “Weekly War.”
2. The Weekly War will be a contest to design a particular type of theme (e.g. magazine, business, etc.) as voted on by the community (via poll) the week before.
3. The top two designs which the community votes for will be sold in the Theme Store. The winning designers will receive 25% and 10%, respectively, each time their winning design sells.
Winning designers are also permanently invited to produce new themes for Theme Wars and share in the profits.
The great thing about the themes so far is they’re indeed in line with Unique Blog Designs’ class of work, no matter the winner. It’s not like they’re throwing up a crapola theme along a professionally designed one. There are some talented designers crafting some very nice themes for you to choose between.
So, how much does all this cost? The individual themes are pretty reasonably priced starting at $69 for use on multiple sites. An interesting approach Theme Wars has taken is a membership option giving you access to all themes, past/present/future, as well as support, tutorials and documentation. You pay a one-time fee along with a monthly membership fee.
Even though the site doesn’t seem to be continuing with it’s weekly theme war, a case could still be made for either buying a theme or two, or even signing up for the membership system to grab a bunch of high quality themes. If you consider an average price of $40 to $50 for a good quality theme, you would easily get your money’s worth with just a few themes.
All themes will be licensed under the WordPress GPL, which means that even with the basic theme license, customers will be able to use the themes on as many sites as they like.
And if you are asking yourself “Will the themes work with my plug-ins?”. The answer is: Absolutely. However, we cannot guarantee that all plug-ins we did not create will work. Some plug-ins have unknown java script in them and may not work. Without a doubt the fast majority will.
ColorMatic is from the master developers of Theme Wars. I’m not going to delve too deep into what this theme can do – there simply is too much information for that. Instead, let me go over some things I noticed off the bat that of course, struck my eye. Note that I only do reviews of themes that “strike” my eye. Otherwise, I personally don’t think they’re worth reviewing.
ColorMatic
ColorMatic could be the perfect theme for your Wordpress blog
ColorMatic seems to me the perfect “skin” for your Wordpress. It’s very web 2.0, sleek, and potential for customization is so high that you morph this baby into something unique that you can call your own. And I imagine – customization shouldn’t be so hard to do: just slap on an shiny header graphic and done!
Excellent use of rounded corners – no immediate graphics in the pages, elements are all in code. This is sign of good search optimization which I’m sure is attracting web owners and bloggers alike. The layout is semi-magazine with good emphasis on white space, ad placements and thumbnails. I think it’s the perfect skin because it not like a minimalistic frame that’s too bare; but not too much style either that it’s too distinct.
Skimming through the theme features, it’s kind of hard to digest all the “Morphing” abilities this theme can do. I like the four possible layouts because judging from the screenshots – it covers almost all the layouts you ever invented for a magazine styled blog.
If you’re looking for a new theme for a blog project, or even an existing blog (I’m always looking for new themes for my blogs), check out Theme Wars
