This post may seem a bit strange considering the other one I wrote a few days ago about the possible end of Premium wordpress themes. In fact, it is a direct question that every theme designer should ask himself in order to anticipate and face every new trend appearing in the near future.

The point is that if premium wordpress themes are going to end, what could wordpress themes look like in the coming months? Today the answer of this question is easy to get: indeed, Ian Stewart from themeshaper.com asked directly 11 influent wordpress designers what they thought about the future of Wordpress: their detailed answers can be found in a long post and they are quite eloquent…

Personnally, I do not agree with all of them, but I would like to point out some of their remarks.

Theme clubs

When you can get several themes by paying a yearly fee, and when this fee is particularly cheap (let’s take the example of wpdesigner and its 5$ themes club) you are of course much more willing to pay than for one unique design sold for more than 50$.  That is I think something that will increase in the near future.

Themer kits

Cal Coleman from the WP themer Kit pointed out that there are more and more people who like to build their own theme by themselves. That is why he proposes on his website a kit that will allow you to build your simple theme. After all that is what web 2.0 is all about!

Simpler themes

Justin Tadlock is completely right when he says that the average user doesn’t know what widgets, theme options, or custom fields are. They just want their site to look pretty. That is one of the main problems of the magazine themes, really in fashion these days. They are making great use of custom fields and all the hidden possibilities offered by Wordpress but in the end it may be hardly undestandable by the user who gets to adapt it for its own blog. That is why designers have to focus on usability of the tools and themes they create. Choose to use more widgets and less hard code solutions will always be more attractive for the average user for instance.

To conclude, you have seen that all these designers are talking about money. That may be the future of Wordpress: a free open source platform with thousand of great tools… if you can afford to pay for it.