Envato, a company that operates a set of marketplaces for digital goods, tutorial sites, and a handful of other “projects,” announced that it has launched a new service that will let you buy and sell Web templates for your Wordpress blog and just about any other CMS in existence.
Dubbed ThemeForest, the service runs off the engine that powers the company’s Flash and royalty-free music loops marketplaces. Items on ThemeForest sell for $10 to $50, depending on the quality of the theme and the developer’s greediness and the library currently has 150 themes in place. The site said that its membership tally is already 75,000, but that’s because the same username is used across all of the company’s marketplaces.
In an attempt to make it easier to buy the templates, users can deposit cash on any of Envato’s three sites and that money can be used on any of the others.
So far, ThemeForest offers a healthy amount of nice themes, but can it really compete with Wordpress itself? There are a slew of themes already in the wild and it’s debatable whether people want another marketplace to buy anymore.
I would like to give some praise for this company. I would highly recommend anyone at least trying to use their services because I have been using their websites for about a year now and it is probably one of the greatest things I’ve ever done. I now have three of their blogs that I check multiple times each day.
Great resource for anything design related. And while I haven’t used their marketplace services I know people who have and it is supposed to be a fantastic service. Glad to see it show up on TechCrunch
how much are they paying you for this endorsement, some of those themes I wouldn’t even download if they were free!
I’m not being payed lol. I’ve just been using their stuff for awhile, mainly their PSDTUTS, NETTUTS and FreelanceSwitch websites. I just think they provide good services that are focused on the community.
Their websites and templates (for falsh also) are of a HIGH quality and very customizable, every one has a taste, I like this community and it’s the BEST I HAVE EVER found
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thanks for that it really look nice, nice design, we will use it for sure.
Doesnt look so great…not sure whether they can ever compete with free (and some paid) WP themes..
Most importantly, many of such paid/premium themes are available on torrents and can be easily shortcircuited.
-Ashish/ http://www.pluggd.in
We know about these problems – the key of selling digital content is to let users enrich them with their own cultural space. We try to do it on Klatcher – it’s more a mixture between a marketplace and a rich blogging platform.
Klatcher makes your content sell. A place to monetize the creative mind.
I wish I was as good at web design as I was programming. It definitely sounds like a nice way to make a few extra bucks. Perhaps some day there will be a nice marketplace for code snippets or WordPress plugins.
DIY is better than buy a template… i think
not only a great marketplace but envato is also a great community company as they proved in support of blogactionday
http://styl.eti...e-great-prizes/
What might probabaly work in Envanto’s favor is the social media presence it already enjoys with its mini blog network…while not really close to the big networks in terms of numbers, it has a loyal following especially among the freelance webdesigner niche.. and that sort of is the long tail in web design and development.. if they come together and promote theme forest as a marketplace for their designs (and they very well might because of envanto’s blogs) then we can see a pretty robust marketplace much better than most other marketplaces…
also one important point that Don missed is that it is not just a wp theme marketplace but caters to a wider market…
Ok am not a fanboy.. just that I like the business model that they have at eden…
It will soon become the number one marketplace to shop for themes. Just give it some time.
@Maneesh Madambath: the new name is Envato. It was Eden before. People might get confused.
As a successful author on one of their websites (bobocel), I can definitely recommend any good programmers and designers to check their websites not only for the possibility of buying, but for selling!
There are a number of authors that have reached the milestone of 100.000$, and a lot more are really close to it.
So take a few moments and check the network of websites. I’m sure you’ll enjoy browsing and connecting with the amazing community! See you there.
great theme. great templates. great way to expand.
Free stuff! Seriously…
http://freeever...ing.weebly.com/
Im curious as to who would actual pay for some of these. Most of the free wordpress templates I have found own these…
There are so many great free themes out there. From my point of view, it’s a stark choice. Go free or spend premium money for custom themes. The soft middle underbelly of moderately-priced themes looks like a losing proposition.
WP themes have to be GPL’ed, therefore anyone who buys a theme can legally share/give it away to anyone else (on another site for example). It’s not a good business model.
Great article!!! Congratulation for your blog! I don’t know this amazing service!
Great to see this site crunched!
It’s a brilliant service for designers and for people looking for cheap, professional web templates.
The themes are decent, at least a few of them, but most are similar to numerous FREE themes that are available. I have a few blogs running great themes that I got for free at wpelements.com, it would take something special from these guys to get me to pay that much for a theme.
I do keep the URL of the site where I got the free themes in my footers…
I think that ThemeForest is looking great so far. Also, everyone commenting is focusing on how there are free WordPress themes (and some of those are selling quite well). The majority of what they have so far is html site templates. (Right now there are 100 site templates, 36 WP, 8 Joomla, and 8 misc.) These appear to range from $10 – $15 which is very reasonable given the standard of quality at ThemeForest.
ThemeForest provides great design layouts with reasonable rates.
Great!
Envato Marketplace is really showing what they got, they’re sites hits a lot of traffic also I like their services specially ThemeForest which provides good quality design in a reasonable rates, love also the FlashDen lots of good stuff in that site. Good Luck to the company… Nice to see it here being Crushed
I think ThemeForest is a pretty great service if you’re looking for decently priced templates – I purchased a couple. One pitfall is their deposit strategy but I’ve come up with a hack to allow you to deposit only the exact amount you need to purchase your package. If your total happens to be a multiple of $20 don’t bother reading the hack.
i want to share my free wordpress theme here.
Preview:
http://www.eleg...m/preview/eVid/
Download:
http://www.send...com/file/6uv0n2
like theme forest, very good bec just been on