A number of leading designers have already dominated this WordPress premium themes market; quite notably: Woothemes, DIYThemes and StudioPress.

But amongst these big names you may have come across a more succinct, straightforward and classy premium theme designer – simply named “Elegant Themes“.

Who is Elegant Themes?

Elegant Themes is owned by a designer named Nick Roach. This means that all of the designs and code that is produced from Elegant Themes is from this mighty fellow. According to Nick:

I created this website to provide WordPress themes of quality and integrity. I craft my themes with a goal of simplicity and professionalism and strive to inject each design with a dose of modest elegance. I believe that your website is not just a tool, it is an integral part of your identity. My job is to respect each customer by providing attractive and userfriendly templates that will help you achieve your online goals.

What’s so special about Elegant Themes?

Quality over quantity. Elegant Themes is hardly a large collection – I mean, there’s only about 30 downloadable themes at the time of this writing. But note they are quite high quality. Check out some of them below:

Wooden

Very down to earth, classy and professionally done – this theme can transform your blog into a modern website wonder.

Lumin

Soothing to the eye with subtle textures and sharp, detailed accents – this theme is packed with visual amenities that scream WEB 2.0!

GrungeMag

Semi-magazine, semi-newspaper – beautiful textures, slider, thumbnails – simply stunning.

Evid

Create your own “Hulu” styled video website with this theme:

Deviant

The ultimate grunge look! Random page tears, crumpled paper, dirty textures – you want your blog to stand out from the crowd – this be the theme for you!

Like Nick said – “each design is injected with a dose of modest elegance”. With each theme you will find excellent color schema, superb use of typography, plenty of textures, just the right amount of Javascript, and above all – originality. The themes obviously took time to build.

You Can’t Beat 20 Bucks a Year!

I don’t think I can elaborate on this any further. $20 dollars a year gives you unlimited access to all of Elegant Themes. Whether you’re a blog owner, an entrepreneur, or even a web developer – you’ve already won by having this arsenal of elegant designs to beautify your websites; all for about the same price as a bucket of fried chicken. Head on over to Elegant Themes!

Argyle’s Drudge has a very narrow content area of only 746 pixels. I chose to stay away from the standard 960 grid design because I find that grunge layouts don’t seem to play well with it. Speaking of grid based design, find this article about lining up your posts perfectly within the grid. As I was saying – the whole point of grunge is random and spontaneous – conforming to a grid just doesn’t fit.

More Details:

The pale blue watercolor splash background is courtesy of my Backgrounds etc. The beautiful hand sketched fonts is known as “Fail Font” and can be downloaded from DaFont.com. Note that since “Fail Font” is free – it’s the perfect opportunity to use Cufon in your coding. Cufon is the technology that enables you to use any kind of font in your pages (read article).

Argyle’s Drudge is completely free to use for your next theme of choice. May it be WordPress, Blogger, Typepad: all I ask in return is for you to follow my updates in Twitter or leave a comment below.

Download Argyles Drudge.

Usage

Blue Rooster is ready to use out of the box. The standard blog template will work with or without assigning thumbnails to your posts. In order to use thumbnails – you would have to assign custom fields to your posts with name: “image“. To learn more about custom fields – check this link from the WordPress Codex. You DO NOT have to resize your images for the thumbnails, thanks to the Darren Hoyt for his TimThumb script which made this all possible. The thumbnails are also powered by jQuery: PrettyPhoto – which is a lightbox clone where the larger images are displayed when clicked. A link to the single post is also included with the larger image.

The Bonus Templates

If you want to use the slide show in the front page – just apply the template “template-home” to your home page. Then make this page the static page of your site. To customize the slide show – simply replace the images in the images folder. Note that there are two sets of images: the larger image and the bottom bar. The active state and non-active state of the bottom bar matches the larger image. The Testimonials section in the template are actual posts under a category: testimonials. Simply create this category and start creating posts under it. The testimonial author works as the title for this section.

The Photo Gallery page is as simple as applying “photo gallery” to a page. The images in this gallery are automatically populated from your custom field thumbnails. So in order for this to populate – you must use thumbnails in your post.

Other Stuff

A custom login form is built in the header which is also jQuery powered. Once logged in will give you quick access to the dashboard, as well as quick “Edit” links after each post. The single post page includes an author information which feeds information from your user profile and Gravatar. So to utilize this section – your user information and gravatar must be filled out. The comments section support threading and pagination.

You can demo Blue Rooster from this link. Download the theme from here. I can also release the .psd files for customization only if I get a large response (by leaving comments). Otherwise – feel free to check it out and use it for your next project.

How to add links inside the Slideshow

In the template file called “template-home.php” is a section called “rotate” (means a div with an id named “rotate”). Within this rotate section, is a series of empty divs that have different ids – namely: fragment-1, fragment-2 and fragment-3. Even though these fragments are empty – they are styled with a background image in the stylesheet – so they appear that they have a large image.

You can enter anything inside these fragments as you wish (text, other images and even links).

Save the template and view

Now it’s totally up to you to change the background image, to fit the new link. It is also up to you to change the “style” of the link – to make it into a button, a large image – whatever you wish.
As mentioned, these div fragments are empty – so you can add anything you want.

The Home Page

The Garamond’s home page mimicks a magazine layout. This was made possible without any special wordpress queries, nor does it filter by categories. Instead, the latest post is automatically styled different. Thanks to this neat trick by Ruhani Rabin. The feature image and the thumbnails are automatically resized upon client request. Meaning, you can upload any size image (preferably wider than 540 pixels – which is the size of the container), assign it to a custom field – and voila! Images are cropped, zoomed and sharpened when once the browser hits it. The code I used is from Darren Hoyt known as TimThumb.

The Inner Pages

The Garamond is a bloggers theme. Traditional templates are intact: search, archive, category etc. I also included an authors bio at the end of each single post, as well as an author template which grabs all their articles. I went a little overboard in styling the subheadings for the post (shown below). The default font family used is of course – Garamond; although since it is not a standard font – Georgia is used as back up. The contrast between the larger text and the tiny Verdana is striking – which I felt was good.

Other Features

The two sidebars and the footer are all widget driven. Comments support Gravatars, pagination as well as multi-level threads. I’ve also added a random quote container right below the header – which requires the Stray Quotes plugin by Italyisfalling.com


You can view the demo from this link, or download directly from here. All I ask is for you leave a comment below – or follow my updates via twitter.