Several months ago the niche website experts Spencer Haws from nichepursuits.com and Chris Guthrie from makemoneyontheinternet.com teamed up to produce a new premium theme. Since they each create dozens of sites a year they were looking to create a solution that would allow them to easily customize each one, as well as allow for easy click-through rate testing to maximize each site’s profits.

The result was released during their webinar last night and is aptly called the Niche Website Theme.

Here are a couple features that makes the theme standout:

• pre-made color schemes
• high converting ad layout options
• easy adsense and amazon banner placements

I just picked up my own copy and will be updating this Niche Website Theme review with the results of my testing. Bookmark this post so you don’t miss out on the many future updates I have planned!

Directories used to be all the rage in the early days of the Internet, but seem to have fallen off over the last few years. I see a couple listed on Flippa every couple weeks that seem to do well as far as sales are concerned, but I don’t hear them discussed much as a viable online business model.

I got an email earlier in the week from someone looking to setup a directory but didn’t know how to code one up on their own. I did some searching through the inventory of my favorite premium theme developers and came across a really high quality design from the renowned theme shop Elegant Themes.

In fact, they happened to release their WordPress directory theme just a couple months ago. Here’s a glimpse of eList:

I recommended this theme for a couple reasons. As you can obviously see – unlike most directories that still look like they are living in the 90′s – this theme is simply gorgeous. It comes in five different colors so you can suite it to your own preference or tailor it to your niche.

Second, since it was built by Elegant Themes you can be certain that it is a dream to drive through their awesome ePanel theme options panel and shortcode list. and if you can’t figure something out? Drop by the support forums and get top notch assistant from their experts for free (this alone makes the price they charge seem like peanuts).

Lastly, to go back to earlier where I mentioned using a WordPress directory theme to make some income: eList comes complete with ecommerce integration to automatically accept online payments with ease, and if that’s not your style you can setup banner ads to start generating revenue in a snap.

To see eList in action and to check out the rest of the 70+ themes that come with it for under $40, go ahead and visit the site at elegantthemes.com

My friend Hesham owns an awesome theme design business named Thesis Awesome that focuses exclusively on the Thesis Theme from DIYthemes. He’s starting the year off running, first with a release of an innovative and useful review plugin that’s available from the WordPress plugin directory. Now it’s time for him to get paid for the hard work that has gone into creating the Avenger Thesis Skin.

Here’s a quick look at the design:

Avenger Thesis Skin Features

The skin comes with a couple of the standard features that Thesis Awesome has been incorporating into their latest releases. These include:

• related article with featured image thumbnails
• enhanced author resource boxes and bio options
• Google AdSense targeting and banner ad placement
• “Geeky Options” after content action box and more

Awesome Avenger Newsletter Opt-In Forms

This appears to be the main feature behind the Avenger Skin for Thesis. There has been a lot of commotion going on in the blogosphere about building your list and providing numerous ways to capture your visitors’ emails. Avenger looks to solve this for you by providing a system to add completely customized opt-in boxes nearly anywhere on the page. Whether you want blue, orange, or green. In the header, sidebar, or even the footer. Avenger has got you covered.

Thesis Awesome is running a release promotion for Avenger for the next 10 days, with the special price of $37.If you are at all interested in an opt-in oriented blog design, this would be a good time to head over there and check it out before they raise it up to the regular price. See more over at thesisawesome.com

The premium theme shop Elegant Themes just announced the release of their latest project – the Convertible Landing Page theme. Their goal with Convertible was to create a landing page system that “is both functional and beautiful.”

We’re the first to agree that all the landing page apps we have seen focus almost exclusively on organizing words on a page and slapping up Buy Now buttons. One look at Convertible and you’ll notice something different – it actually looks good.

The theme operates by making use of drag-and-drop modules, which appear similar to how widgets operate on typical WordPress themes. Drag these versatile modules onto the page then configure them with your mouse. You can create customized looks without getting into the code.

Why does this matter? Well if you follow the advice of landing page experts, you’ll know how much testing should go into your page. By making tweaks to colors, columns, tables, images, and even big advanced layout changes as simple as dragging a module around, you can find your optimally converting page with little hassle.

Convertible Landing Page Theme Features

Convertible is an affiliate marketing dream theme. It has all the critical components of a landing page, and the styling and polish to everything from the ribbons to the text boxes really make this theme a contender for your toolbox. Here’s some of my favorite features:

• ribbon headers
• testimonial boxes
• video embedding
• tabbed and toggled content
• excellent box styles

Elegant Themes has included Convertible as part of their $39 membership package, so if you’re at all in the market for a landing page system, this is a great value when you consider the free bonus of over 65 other themes. For more information you should visit their site elegantthemes.com

The premium theme crowd gets a great release today with the Genesis framework 1.8 update from StudioPress.

The 1.8 update appears geared toward making customization and theme development even easier. Comment lines now make up over 40% of all lines of code in Genesis 1.8, up from 30% in Genesis 1.6, with a significant amount of non-comment code having been added in the meantime as well.

Here’s just some of the main changes made to the framework:

• New SEO Controls
• New Extendable Classes for Creating Admin Menus
• Completely Disable a Navigation Menu, from functions.php
• Color Style Options
• Code Standards and Inline Documentation

New Genesis Framework Default Theme

The team also updated the design of the default theme that appears when you have Genesis activated without a child theme applied. Besides the new look, the theme is also responsive, which means it will adjust its dimensions based on what kind of device the site is accessed from.

Genesis 1.8 does require the newest version of WordPress 3.3.1 to be fully compatible. After that, grabbing the update is a snap, just go to Themes and click to move to the new version. A major benefit of using a theme framework is that the update only effects the actually framework files, and not the customization of your child theme.

For more info on the Genesis theme framework, checkout the site at studiopress.com

The folks over at Headway Themes have released their Headway 3.0.5 update today. It comes complete with plenty of fixed bugs from 3.0 along with a slew of additional features. The entire change log can be found at their site here.

There are enough improvements for practically anyone with sites running Headway to upgrade, and for those previously on the fence about investing in the premium theme to take a second look. To upgrade, just log into your site’s dashboard and select the upgrade link, or you can grab a full zip copy in the members’ area of headwaythemes.com and upload it via FTP.

Headway is Now Responsive Grid Enabled

The main update to Headway is their inclusion of the responsive grid design ability that has been rapidly growing in popularity among premium themes. Headway now allows you to choose whether to make your site mobile-friendly, and you can have it done in just 2 steps. Whereas most responsive themes force you it on you (or require knowing your way around the code well enough to remove it yourself) Headway provides two interesting ideas.

The first is for site owners to decide for themselves whether to add responsiveness, use a mobile theme plugin, or simply show the site the same way to every visitor.

The other nice feature is it allows your visitor to decide whether to view the site as it normally looks by selecting the option at the bottom of the theme, or just leave it re-sized for their device.

For more information on this update to the Headway Theme, visit the site headwaythemes.com