I had this half baked thought last night while I was falling asleep and I want to painfully extract it and put it down in words. So bear with me. I don’t like Premium Themes. There I said it.
Now once you’ve recovered from that initial shock and have stopped flaming and spamming my comments I’ll explain why. First of all by “Premium Themes” I mean website themes that you buy on ThemeForest or from subscription sites like UpThemes. Now I don’t have anything against these sites and companies, I even attempted selling my own themes on ThemeForest for a while. But something is wrong.
Something is Wrong
The idea makes sense. Designers need to get paid for their work. So make a theme that can be continually re-sold. Excellent. Developers like myself come along, find a theme I like for a website I’m building and purchase the theme. Great so far. I’ve even got over the fact that the website won’t be “unique” and client isn’t that bothered (fairly unrealistic). Fantastic. Then I try to implement my theme. I take the client’s content and try and fit it into the theme. Hmmm… problem.
You see through actual experience of using Premium Themes and trying to make client websites out of them I always run into this problem. It feels like I’m hacking and pushing the content into the theme. Depending on the quality of theme you may experience different degrees of difficulty with this, however with all of the themes I have tried I have always come across the same issue. It doesn’t feel right.
So what’s the problem?
Content should be king. I’m not just saying that out of some blind faith in people who say these things on the web. Rather this is a conclusion of my experience. A website should always be designed around the content. It makes sense and, in my experience, makes your life a whole lot easier. Designers should design for the content, and developers should work with designers or learn to design themselves. This way content will always be king, and you’ll never have to hack your content into a design ever again.
Conclusion
So in conclusion what I am saying is that websites should be designed for the content. Premium Themes go against this ethos and are, in my humble opinion, producing a culture of quick money and “hacked together” websites.
What do you think?
