For one, many of them look really nice and polished. For some types of sites, this is a must. You want to have a professional looking site, and many of the best wordpress themes were designed by expert designers. So you get the benefit of their design and typography skills to ensure the best possible looking site.

Many premium wordpress themes can’t even be considered standalone themes. Instead, I would call them wordpress theme frameworks because they are so customizable. Basically, you can essentially use these frameworks to create any sort of design you desire. For some themes, this might require a little bit of coding. For others, all customization can be done within the theme’s control panel. It really is amazing to see what you can do with these premium themes these days.

On the PPC side of things, I’m looking for wordpress themes that make it easy to create sales pages, landing pages and squeeze pages. There are quite a few premium wordpress themes that fit the bill for this.

OptimizePress – This theme by James Dyson is one of my favorite wordpress themes for PPC marketers. OptimizePress makes it extremely simple to setup great looking landing pages and squeeze pages. It comes with some great looking graphics and templates, and you can build pages that look exactly like the typical guru product launch pages. You can set a template for each page you create, and you insert various elements like headers, bullets, testimonials and more using the special OptimizePress shortcodes. Once you get used to how it works, it is really quite simple to use.

Affiliate Theme – This theme has been out for awhile now, but it’s decent theme for create affiliate pages really quickly. If you wanted to create your own Ringtone theme for example, Affiliate Theme has a decent looking template for that. Most of the customizations for this theme can be done through it’s extensive control panel of theme options.

Thesis Theme – This is one of the cooler theme frameworks out there. Unlike OptimizePress, which is more suited for a certain set of sites, Thesis is more general purpose premium wordpress theme. Sure, you can create landing pages with it if you like, but you can also use it for many different blog designs as well. It’s highly customizable, and SEO ready out of the box. You do have to get your hands dirty if you want to do more complicated designs, but once you master the Thesis hooks concept, it really isn’t too difficult.

These are three of the best wordpress themes around that I’ve tried. Let me know what your favorite wordpress themes are in the comments below.

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I know I blew off WP Quick Polls in my last post, but Joe was nice enough to give out several review copies of WP Quick Polls on the PPC Coach Forums and I was able to get my hands on a copy. I had been sitting on it for a few weeks, but I finally got around to installing it this weekend. I haven’t really seen an in-depth WP Quick Polls review posted online anywhere yet, so below are my thoughts after playing around with the product. I will be comparing it to WP Easy Polls (WPEP) since that is currently my poll creation tool of choice.

For those who aren’t familiar with the product, WP Quick Polls is a WordPress plugin for creating CPA polls. It costs $49.95, which places it between Poll Control and Poll Factory in terms of price. Installation of WP Quick Polls is relatively simple, although it is quite large (10MB) relative to other plugins I have installed. For some reason (slow connection?), it took about 10-15 minutes to upload everything to my server. It is nice to see some documentation and a quick start guide, which I skimmed through, but I am the type of person that likes to figure things out myself.

In a lot of ways, WP Quick Polls and WP Easy Polls offer similar results, using different approaches. WP Quick Polls gives you a lot more power by allowing you to micro-manage every aspect of your polls. Want to change the instruction text size and color? There’s a section for that. Want to customize the number of empty lines before your RSS feed? You can specify this too. You can customize everything including your themes within the WP Quick Polls control panel. However, for those new to polls, I think the amount of options can be overwhelming. Although WP Quick Polls does include a lot of helpful instruction text and inline help, I still found myself constantly confused at what a lot of options did. I can see this being a problem for new users.

WPEP on the other hand is much easier to setup and run out of the box. It only has one single poll creation page and the interface is much easier to get up and running right away. WP Quick Polls does include a Quick Create option which works nicely once you configure it the settings how you like it. However, this just brings it up to speed to WPEP’s default behavior.

One issue I ran into with my WP Quick Polls setup is that I could never get any of my poll images to show up. I ended up having to consult the documentation and it seems like this is a pretty common issue as it has a whole section which addresses this. I currently have WP Quick Polls installed on Hostgator, and othere happens to be an issue with WordPress Fantastico installs. I worked through each of the suggestions like setting the permissions of my cache directory to 755 as well as disabling the cache and resize image options, to no avail. I’m no technical wiz, but I don’t quite understand why displaying an image from a url would require all this messing around. I know Hostgator is one of the most popular web hosts for PPC Coach members so I think this would be an important issue to get resolved.

Poll themes are one of most important aspects of any poll creation tool and WP Quick Polls does include several built-in themes. Based on my experience, it looks like the Plain themes would work the best. They are comparable to the Simple Theme from WPEP which I currently use and get good landing page click through rates with. I have my doubts at how well the other included themes convert as they don’t meet some of the best practices described on the PPC Coach forums. Don’t take my word for it though, as this is something you will want to test yourself. WP Quick Polls does allow you to edit themes from within the control panel. Some may like this, but I find it much easier to edit code in an external text editor.

Feature wise, both tools have the same basic features you want in a poll creation tool, namely offer rotation, and support for both the two popular tracking systems, PPC Coach Tracker and Tracking202. Both also give you the option to use double-metarefresh which is important because it allows you to cloak your referer and hide your poll page. One feature I like, that is unique to WP Quick Polls is the campaign feature, which allows you to group offers together and share them across polls. This might prove to be a nice timesaver. WP Quick Polls also includes several seeminly unnecessary features as well. For example, there are two options in the Settings page, “Show results after vote Javascript” and “Show results on interim page”. Next to each of these options is the text “not recommended” and “even more not recommended”. Why are they in there then? In my opinion, it only serves to clutter up the interface.

Overall, WP Quick Polls does a decent job, but I don’t think I can end up recommending it over WP Easy Polls. I just found the interface too clunky to navigate around and it just feels inundated with various options that I don’t feel I need. WP Quick Polls does have its nice points, but nothing that would warrant shelling out $50 for it when you can get the same functionality for free with WP Easy Polls. If you are a CPA Poll expert and like the ability to modify everything from within the control panel, you may want to give WP Quick Polls a look. However, for everyone else, I think using a free copy of WP Easy Polls is still the way to go.

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