After reading a great series by Nathan Rice on the setup of WordPress for search engine optimization I’ve decided to spend next week developing a series of freemium WordPress templates for businesses to use on their own business websites. A few weeks back, I wrote an article on how you could put up a website for just $100, these templates would be wonderful for companies interested in building an affordable website for little money.

Free, Freemium or Premium?

Part of why I like being in the WordPress community is the co-operative nature of the community and how we support each other by building better plug ins, better templates and helping to improve the core of the software. To that end, the idea of Premium WordPress themes offends me just a little but I also appreciate everybody needs to make money so I’m torn. There are advantages to Premium themes and money does motivate people to make better themes so I guess I’m at a loss for how to release these themes.

With that said, I plan to release the next five themes as my own version of Feemium. For those who are WordPress experts already, you’ll be able to download them and use them under a license but for those who need help, I’ll provide installation and configuration for a consulting fee. Specifically, the new themes will feature a few things:

1. They will feature strong designs with various businesses in mind. My previous theme was attractive but these will be better.
2. They will follow heuristic rules, both my own and those of industry experts.
3. The designs will be usable, with a focus on usability for the end user.
4. Each design will be optimized for the web and search engines using the practices I’ve previously discussed.

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The Themes:

1. Smashingly Good Free Magazine Theme for WordPress
2. Small Business Theme
3. One Night in Paris SEO Theme