Elegant Themes Origin WordPress Theme

Less than $1 per year for a theme! Can you find a better deal than this? On top of this, the themes are beautifully designed and packed with awesome features!

At the risk of sounding like a salesperson pushing sales, I’m absolutely amazed with how Nick of Elegant Themes is able to come out with awesome themes one after another. And yet still manage to maintain such a low price!

Oh, you should check out their latest theme, the Origin WordPress theme.

Origin WordPress Theme

Origin by Elegant Themes is a premium WordPress theme designed especially for those who wished to showcase their work.

According to Elegant Themes, Origin “is a stunning grid-based theme that tells a story through imagery”. Grid-based themes seem to be quite popular these days, probably following the success of Pinterest. And not surprising too. Pictures tell a thousand words and to your visitors, pictures can act as an intro or a gist to your posts. The grid layout is great as an engaging feature between author and visitors!

With that in mind, the websites that would find this theme most useful are those who feature a lot of images like blogs, photography, design, education and so forth.

When it was made available in October 2012, I was eagerly playing… I mean testing it and found it to be wonderfully creative and truly adds the fun back into blogging. The only thing that I find myself wishing for is e-commerce features. But then again, it is a personal and portfolio theme rather than business or e-commerce theme so it does meet what it’s expected to do.

Origin’s Features

Take a look at some of its features.

• Ajax Infinite Scroll

  This is a great way of keeping your visitors on your page and lower your bounce rate! What your visitors experience when browsing your portfolio is an infinite scrolling. Latest posts are loaded automatically and you get to display all your post on one extended page.

• Unlimited thumbnails display

  Similar to Pinterest, Origin too allows you to display as many images as you have, on your homepage. Each image is linked to a post.

• Mouse over effect

  When your visitors hover their mouse over the images, the post details eg title, date and the first few words will appear. This gives the visitors an idea of what the post is about and whether they wish to read more about it. If they are curious to know more, they can just click on the magnifying glass and the entire post will appear.

• Responsive

  This means that no matter what devices your visitors are using, whether desktops or laptops; tablets or smartphones, your website will automatically resize to fit the respective screen size. The side navigation automatically reduces itself to just a single line above the grid. This navigation menu will have drop down effect when clicked.

• ePanel

  ePanel is an easy and simple way to manage the theme. If scripting and coding language are not your cup of tea, that’s not a major issue as Elegant Themes’ control panel is famous for being user-friendly and that it’s powerful enough to allow you to customize the theme in your own unique way. General settings, navigations, layouts, ad management and SEO are just a few of the many controls you have over the Origin theme.

• Unlimited Color Options

  Origin is the first theme that Elegant Themes decides to integrate with WordPress Theme Customizer interface. This feature allows this theme’s user to create unlimited color schemes easily, through an intuitive WYSIWYG editor. Life can indeed be simple and beautiful!

• Others

  There are lots of other features like browser compatibility, collection of shortcodes and templates as well as top-notch support.

The Cost For All This Is…

As mentioned in the beginning of this post, it cost less than $1 for a theme. Elegant Themes currently has 87 themes and a year’s fee of Personal membership is $69. What this membership offers are full access to ALL themes, including future themes as well as future updates and support. And once you have downloaded any theme, it’s yours to keep, even if you terminate your membership. The only things you don’t get should you terminate your membership are updates and support.

However, if you are a web designer and wish to use the themes for your clients’ websites, then you need to get the Developer package which costs only $89 per year. This membership provides you full access to all plugins and availability of layered Photoshop files, on top of what the Personal package offers. Truly value for money!

Origin is one of the best themes around for showcasing creative portfolios. The fact that it is designed by Elegant Themes makes it more reliable and affordable for you and me to own it. Give it a try and you will see that Origin may just be the perfect theme for you or your clients.