How many times have you found yourself looking for a theme for your wordpress or Joomla. If you would ask me that question, I’d say I must have wasted (for the lack of better word) a lot of my working hours looking for a theme that suits the theme of my wordpress blog.

I know the resources have improved over a period of time and there are lots of blogger doing post of some great themes thus reducing the pain of going out looking for themes. But this behavior of bloggers is more or less restricted to very common free themes. What if you want to be different and are ready to shed a few bucks to get a paid theme for your blog.

Well, your quest for themes will end here. ThemeForest, is a platform where sellers and buyers come together. It’s a platform for sellers to sell their themes and for buyers to go and buy themes for their blog. There’s a great variety of themes for an affordable price for almost all the popular CMSs.

I just wanted to check out what price and variety is available for wordpress themes and it did not disappoint me. I saw some great themes costing as less as $10. So if you are looking for themes for wordpress, drupal, Joomla and any other popular CMS, I am sure ThemeForest will help you get one.

What we are going to see today is a service that gives you the liberty to create your own theme on the fly with almost no effort! This service is called as Wordpress Theme Generator and is pretty handful in creating unique themes for your blog absolutely free.

Following is what the service has to offer:

This online generator creates your own custom unique WordPress Theme. Without any need for HTML, JS, PHP, or CSS knowledge. Change the colors, settings, layout, preview live, click “save” and download your unique Wordpress theme zip-file. Extract, upload, set, and you are done!

Based on WordPress 2.1 to 2.5 with Yahoo! UI (grids, tabs & fonts) to support all A-Grade browsers and valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Theme supports Widgets & Tags.

I was wondering after seeing the site that wordpress should support the project by bringing it under the umbrella of automattic.

The best themes are not about best graphical representation but also the small little features which make browsing and navigating through the site a pleasure.

I thought I’d give another try and see if I can find better designers and guess what! I found a few. The themes I have listed below are one of the best themes I have seen in a long time, they are well optimized, offer features which are not common and certainly help you grow your blog.

Remember the best things in the world come for a price. So, if you are serious about your Blog and brand, it’s worth spending on one of these themes.

All of these themes are very well priced under $80, money spent on these themes is money well spent.

Let’s start with my favorite..

On Demand and TV. Elements are developed by Jason Schuller at Press75.com. These themes are developed for video blogs or vlogs as you may call it. These themes are so well designed and visually appealing that when I saw them I just couldn’t wait and sent an e-mail to Jason appreciating his work.

On Demand: This theme is a perfect solution for a vlog. Inspired by Hulu.com’s design, It is very specifically designed keeping in mind all the required features and options a video site would need. It can embed any video from any site including Youtube or Blip, etc..  and is capable of handling video formats up to 1024px.

Other features include:

• 4 Configurable Sidebars
• Stylish social links on each of the videos
• Each video offers embed code
• Option to include self-hosted FLV files

View On Demand Live Demo Here

Pricing:

Single Site License $75

Multi Site License $150

Developer License: $250

TV. Elements: This theme comes from the same author but the design is entirely different. As name suggests this theme is for blogs offering video content to their users. This theme is tested with most of the popular video sharing sites including including Blip.TV, Flickr, MetaCafe, MySpace, Veoh, Viddler, Vimeo and YouTube and just like On Demand theme this theme works with almost any embeddable video on the internet.

Other features include:

• 5 configurable Sidebars
• Stylish social links on each of the videos
• Each video offers embed code
• Option to include self-hosted FLV files

View TV. Elements Live Demo Here

Pricing:

Single Site License $50

Multi Site License $125

Developer License: $225

CelebrityPress: This Wordpress theme is available at PlugandPress.com. This Wordpress template is best suited for a fashion magazine, health and fitness, gossip or may be just a girly blog.

This template comes packed with 5 design samples, 2 with plain background, 3 with patterned background and 1 which lets you upload your own logo.

This template is truly loaded with features you can’t resist.  In author’s own words…

CelebrityPress is packed full of features, a Theme Options Interface where you can manage your own advertisement campaign, a video rotator where you can just copy and paste the share code from YouTube, Daily Motion, Metacafe , etc.

• IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari and Opera compatible
• XHTML and CSS Valid
• 2 Colors (Black & White)
• 2 background samples
• Ad your Adsense or Image Link Code
• Turn all-or-individual banners on/off
• Quick Post – No need to put an image
• Image Auto Resizer
• Random Video Rotator (copy/paste code)
• Flickr Integration
• Build your Own Menu from the Theme Options
• Photo Gallery
• Drop Down Menu (Build your Own)
• Customized Error page with sitemap
• Unique Post Randomizer
• Gravatar Support
• Stylesheet switcher

View CelebrityPress Live Demo Here

Pricing:

Single Site License $79.95

Multiple Site License $179.95

Developer’s License $279.95

F8 Remixed (GraphPaperPress.com): This theme is for bloggers who interact visually with their viewership. It’s a photo and media rich content. Compatible with iPhone and very well optimized for search engines.

The template offers Galleria support of images, Gravatrs, auto or manual thumbnail control and lots more.
The best thing I like about this template is that it’s simple, easy to navigate and strait forward. It’s a perfect template for a media site because there are no loud graphics or designs on this template which will take anything away from the pictures that will be added to the blog.

View f8 remixed demo here

Pricing:

Single Site License: $75

Developer License: $199

Arthemia Premium (Colorlabsproject.com): This is very well made colorful theme which offers total control over all aspects of the template without getting into the code part of the template.

This template offers a unique combination of a blog and magazine design which make it even more desirable for bloggers.
Template offers support for Dropdown menus, colorful categories, adsense optimized, Gravatar, Sidebar and Footer Widget, Automatic Thumbnail Generation and lot of other features which makes this one of the best themes available.

Template offers well SEO’d code for proper optimization of the site and has cross browser support which ensures that your site display will be as you see it on all browsers.

View Artemia Premium Demo here

Pricing:

Single Site License $70

Multiple Site (5 sites) License $140

Developer License $240

Note: For the fact that I am promoting these themes so much, I should also mention that TNerd is in no way affiliated with any of these themes or benefited in any way from promoting these themes.

"It’s been a long time since themes.wordpress.net stopped accepting new themes. Since then most theme authors have been distributing their themes from their own sites, without a good centralized place for people to browse, search, comment on, and rate themes. With the success of the plugins directory, we’ve wanted to have those same benefits in a theme directory. Today is the day we start making that happen, with the introduction of wordpress.org/extend/themes/". Read the rest of the post here.

If you would notice there are only three themes and one of them (and the most popular one as of now) is called monotone. This theme is exceptional photoblogging theme. The theme changes color based on the photos which have been posted on the photoblog. You can see the theme in action on my personal photoblog. If you run a photoblog and are looking for a great theme, monotone is one of the best out there. I just wish they integrate the feature of exif data of photos being pulled (Wordpress now supports the functionality of exif data).

I personally think that this is a great move to leverage the power of both community and open source. I am sure that the purpose of bringing together the developers and giving them a centralized platform to display their work, talent and creativity is a great move.