Battle of the Joomla! Template Houses – 10 Designers: Who’s great, Who sucks…

Categories: Open Source

Battle of the Joomla! Templates

I've spent a tremendous amount of time researching various Joomla! extension developers and template designers. It's tough to determine where to go for your membership… sure, there's lots of places providing free Joomla! templates, but at the end of the day, the quality is far superior with a fee-based membership company. Here you'll find a pretty straight forward review of the top template houses… as well as the places to avoid. 

UPDATED


Joomlart

$49 – $439 /membership

Joomlart has been great to me. The memberships provides 2 templates per month. The continue to provide fresh, new tools with their templates and always have me excited around the 15th and 30th of the month. Joomlart also offers custom design/development as well as provide thier members forums for support. They have recently implemented "JoomlaJobs" on their site, which makes sense because these are the guys behind "Joomlancers." Free extensions available.


 

Overall: joomjoomjoomjoomjoom

Best for : Corporate-style themes

Great for: Quality, easy installation, support, extra tools/extensions.

Themes for: 1.0 & 1.5

Rocket

$75/year

I tend to go back and forth between RocketTheme and Joomlart. Sometimes I like Joomlart better, sometimes RocketTheme. RocketTheme kicks serious ass. They provide only one template per month, but I definitely anticipate the 1st of every month. RocketTheme tends to be very "colorful" as well as creative. They frequently include new extensions with every template which makes their monthly release that much better. Rockettheme provides forums to their users and has a "RocketLabs" site for their extensions. They recently opened their "Rocket Tutorials" section… this should be a GREAT resource. Free extensions available.


 

Overall: joomjoomjoomjoomjoom

Best for: Creative/Colorful Themes

Great for: Stability, easy installation, extra tools/extensions/support

Themes for: 1.0 & 1.5

JoomlaShack

$39.95/template

Another top-notch company for Joomla! Templates. I originally gave these guys a 4.5 out 5 rating, but decided they totally deserve more than that… why? Well, they're a bit more expensive than the Joomlart and RT. The quality is great though, so penalizing due to cost is unjust. Barry North, from Compass Design is part of this team, which adds tremendous value. JoomlaShack has forums for thier users, provides phenomenal support, has tons of tutorials and more…. These guys optimize thier code for SPEED!


 

Overall: joomjoomjoomjoomjoom

Best for: Speed

Great for: Learning, stability

Themes for: 1.0 & 1.5

JoomlaDesigns

$60/year (+/-)/ membership

JoomlaDesigns is a great place to get a TON of templates for a low cost. The quality isn't anywhere near Joomlart, RT, or JoomlaShack, but they do have some good stuff. Included in their membership is about 300 templates to download.. some great, some not-so-great. The rating on these guys is strictly based on cost/value.


 

Overall: joomjoomjoom

Best for: Cost

Great for: Variety

Themes for: 1.0 (claim 1.5 available)

Gavick

$100/year (+/-)/ membership

These guys could easily find themselves in the number one position pretty soon… The 4.5 rating is really based on the time they've been around. As far as quality, Gavick produces KILLER templates. They're fresh and clean and always come with great extensions. The designs are very professional and they're reasonably priced. I'm anxious to see how far they go… They too provide a forum as well as quick response regarding support. Free extensions available.


 

Overall: joomjoomjoomjoomjoom

Best for: Overall Design

Great for: Professional look, integrated modules/components

Themes for: 1.0 & 1.5

PP

$40-$75/template (+/-)

These guys get an average rating. The templates are nice… and colorful, but that's really about it. The cost is very high and I really don't see the value, comparitively speaking. Their site is rather slow, making me question their templates. As well, their site doesn't seem to be very well organized, and they havn't initiated SEF Urls, making me question their knowledge of Joomla! and/or standard web practices. They don't seem to have any user-driven support like the others, but on the positive side, they've been around for quite a while, which clearly means they deserve a decent rating.


 

Overall: joomjoomjoom

Best for: SubPar Value

Good for: Overall Design

Themes for: 1.0

JJ

$15-$30+ /template

Chris is a great guy… with good things in mind. They have a lot of potential.

Upon review… I must say that I really like JoomlaJunkie templates. They SLICK! In fact, I'd say that design-wise, they're on top… Good job.

And for those of you reading this from the beginning, I'd like to apologies to JoomlaJunkie… they really are awesome.  

FOR MORE, CLICK


 

Overall: joomjoomjoomjoomjoom

Best for: Vibrance and Overall Design

Good for: Support

Themes for: 1.0

YouTheme

$50-$200/ membership

At first, I was a bit unsure about these guys… They appeared a bit young – and I hadn't had the opportunity to jump into their themes, but upon review, I'm very impressed. They have some great looking tempaltes.I liked that their templates are very unique compared to most… it's almost hard to tell it's Joomla!. They clearly have some talent working on design. They too have some very cool extensions integrated within their releases and seem reasonably priced. They main site is also very easy to get around… simple is better sometimes. I gave a 4.5 rating, but will likely bump that up to 5 very soon.


 

Overall: joomjoomjoomjoomjoom

Best for: Unique designs

Great for: visual appeal, integrated modules/components, color

Themes for: 1.0 & 1.5

JoomlaJet

$40+/template

Is this for real? For a review on these guys, just refer to the JoomlaJunkie review. I can't even muster up a .5 rating for these guys. The templates suck.. you can easily find free templates much better than these…

FOR MORE, CLICK


 

Overall:

Best for: Non Joomla! users

Themes for: themselves

s5

$40+/membership

Not too sure yet… They seem to have some talent. I know they have some quality extensions as well as designs. I gave them a 3.0 rating for now, but will update with more information. All in all, they seem pretty good… Free templates and extensions available.


 

Overall: joomjoomjoom

Best for: TBD

Themes for: 1.0 & 1.5

s5 

$35 – $180/membership

Template Plazza has some great stuff. I'm not a huge fan of their site, but they have some killer templates. Template Plazza is membership based and has pricing a bit lower than the competition. TP also develops some pretty good extensions, which they typically provide free of charge. You can also find back-end admin templates here which really sets them apart from the rest. I definitely recommend using these guys…

 

Overall: joomjoomjoomjoomjoom

Best for: Site-specific design. ie, directory templates, store templates.

Themes for: 1.0 & 1.5

Popularity: 5% [?]

About the Author

Jason - Father of 3 boys - Open Source Technology advocate and expert. I loves me some Joomla!... Built a profession around open source technology, including Joomla! and Wordpress.

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Comments

  1. Amit Shah Sep 16, 2008

    Hello,

    We wanted to introduce ourselves to you & the Joomla community. We are a new company called Joomlatools, focused on building applications for Joomla users that want professional, extendable open source extensions. All of our extensions will be built from the ground up with lots of user feedback, tried and tested by real customers and professionally written by folks who helped create Joomla!

    Our team consists of both experienced Joomla developers (Johan Janssens – major contributor to Joomla 1.5, Mathias Verraes – major contributor to DOCman and Shayne Bartlett – major contributor to LETTERman) and other open source contributors (Laurens Vandeput – Eclipse, Joomla) and Amit Shah (co-founder and VP Business Development of OpenX).

    Our first application is called Nooku and is focused on helping Joomla users create multi-lingual websites easily, with integrated user workflow and translation management. Nooku fits seamlessly into Joomla 1.5 and is both an extension and a framework. To fund the application development needed to create this extension we have invited members of the Joomla community to contribute funds to employ our team of developers.

    We would love your help in getting the word out about Joomlatools and our first application, Nooku. Please let me know if you would like to learn more about Joomlatools or our applications in development.

    Regards,

    Amit

  2. Mark Dec 8, 2008

    Sage-like. I bet you predicted $200/bbl oil, as well.

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