Organic Themes Review

Organic Themes is a premium WordPress theme subscription service that offers high-quality professional themes aimed at businesspeople and artists. Overall their service is very impressive, though the price may be a bit high for some developers given that many of their themes are specific to certain niches. There are also currently no video tutorials as far as we can tell, which is another factor which drops our overall score.

Organic Themes Pros

Organic Themes caters to the professional client with themes created for artists and business owners. Their themes have a very strong professional look and feel.

Organic Themes Cons

We’d like to see a lot more theme choices at their current price point for their theme subscription.

Licensing Terms

The licensing terms are definitely a great aspect of Organic Themes. For one startup price of $249.00, you receive all of the themes the company has created, as well as all future themes, theme updates, design files, and access to the support forums. There are no annual, monthly, or other recurring fees. Since there are only 18 paid themes right now and updates are released every other month or so on average, the price per theme is rather high at this point at $13.38. Then again, this is access to lifetime themes and updates, so over the long term it could end up being a great value. A lot will depend no how active this company is in the future.

Theme Quality

Theme quality is quite high, and the themes are named for their recommended usage, for example, “Magazine Theme,” “Studio Theme,” “Photographer Theme,” “Music Theme,” “Business Theme,” and so forth. As you can see, many of these are niche products aimed at artists and designers. There aren’t as many generic themes or themes for businesses, which is a bit of a drawback, but for people in the art community these themes are top notch and offer a great way to showcase creations.

Theme Options

Organic Themes provides the usual theme options-you can modify the headers and footers, select a custom menu with special options, add widgets, featured images, featured videos, and change the site colors and so on. Organic Themes also has a unique feature wherein they have partnered with a company called WerkPress which can provide advanced customization if you require something beyond the scope of the tools you are given. You fill out a form on the website to get in touch with the company about their services. Fees are not listed on the site, and presumably depend on what you need and how difficult it will be to achieve. There is a drop-down box that asks you to describe your budget-you’ll notice the lowest price bracket is “$500 or less,” so this is probably a pretty expensive service. Still, it’s yet another option you’re given.

Overall Value

As mentioned previously, the support options are good in general (full documentation, support forum, email and ticketing systems, updates blog, and social networking), but there is a lack of video tutorials. Text-based tutorials with images are included, and they are pretty comprehensive, but videos can save time and make things easier to understand when it comes to WordPress development. We’d like to see a wider variety of themes for non-artists, and it’d be great if the price per theme would drop a bit, but if the company continues to expand that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

Arlene McCann - January 21, 2014

About a couple of months ago my web designer and I looked for a nice theme for my music website. We wanted to put some work into something that had a lot of the work done already. I was looking for a site that could play my music, add photographs, write some blog posts, list my show tours… etc. And what I got was issues even purchasing the site. (That should have been my first red flag) I contacted Organic Themes about this issue, and they said to use Paypal and ignore the error. But I did not WANT to use Paypal, that’s why I chose the to use the credit card direct option. Finally, I decided to then use Paypal just to speed things along because my web designer was waiting to start setting up the site. Next, we had some issues getting the MP3s to play properly. There’s a 4 step (or maybe more) process to get the music to play correctly. And if you enter information not in the perfect format it doesn’t give you an error to tell you that something is wrong. We were never able to get the carousel feature in the photo gallery working as it should. As it does on my web designer’s personal site. But after going back and forth many many times, we settled for something else for photos for now. Not really what we wanted, but honestly, how much I’ve paid for the theme, and then hourly for my web designer… to have all of these issues, I could have paid someone to build a website for me in notepad by now. Additionally, we are now running into an issue where every time you attempt to comment on my blog posts, it throws a 404 error. I’ve researched that this is likely something to do with the permalinks, but have been unable to resolve it myself. I also sent an email to the Organic Themes support but it will usually take a day or two to get back to me. Unfortunately, that means a day or two or more that I can potentially lose fan interest in interacting with the site. And I suspect that when I do hear back from them it won’t be a real solution. It’ll have to be another situation where I settle for a lesser quality feature, or it will go unsolved and I’ll have a buggy website. Unfortunately, at this point, I’ve spent so much time and money on this effort that starting over with a new theme would be extremely painstaking and even more frustrating than this situation already is. However, I’m still not sure I won’t just do that anyway because of how unhappy I am.

Justin - April 9, 2014

They say that they monitor their forums during business hours but they don’t. they have no phone #, no email address, you are at the mercy of waiting for someone to read your forum post (which they don’t). Further emails to their home site are met with sarcasm and apathy. Their theme did not work, had a lot of fatal errors. And when contacted, they couldn’t care less.

Julia - June 30, 2014

SO DISAPPOINTED!! I purchased the Music theme for the plugins and functionality, but after I got in the backend I quickly realized that I had been fooled. The “Tour Dates” calendar plugin would not display concert dates in chronological order (are you kidding?!!!!), and when I contacted support they told me to “deal with it.” The music player malfunctions and won’t play consistently, and the advice I got from support was to go into the backend function.php and attempt to rewrite the code myself to make the music player work. On top of that, almost all customization has to be done through the backend code using HTML. I am not a developer, I do not know a lot about HTML, if I did I wouldn’t be buying prepackaged themes! I asked for a refund, and the company refused. I feel completely taken advantage of….. DON’T BE FOOLED BY ORGANIC THEMES! IT IS NOT WORTH THE MONEY!!!!!!