AppThemes turns WordPress into a series of apps

You already know how convenient, flexible and affordable WordPress is but is there a way to make money with it?

As it turns out, there are countless ways to make money with WordPress and the people at AppThemes have made it easy for “the rest of us” to setup some of them, starting with classified ads and job postings.

Both ClassiPress and JobRoller install easily in mostly any WordPress 3 setup as a theme with lots of handles to tweak it in lots of ways. In the end, the standard themes look good but redesigning it to look less generic might be a sound idea.

The prices are affordable and “unlimited sites” options are offered to developers who want to profit the most from these advanced WordPress themes.

AppThemes has been founded by David Cowgill, a self-declared WordPress enthusiast, user and developer, ever since it was released, in 2005. Being a WP evangelist, the motivation to start up his own WP-centric company came in May of 2010. Since then, AppThemes has captured the attention of a growing crowd of WP developers who don’t necessarily want to spend their days —and nights— coding and who would gladly pay a one-time fee to have the job done by somebody else.

Nobody can expect a ClassiPress or JobRoller install to automagically start making money for its owner on its own but with the right customizations (that the intended customers expect) and savvy marketing, that’ll bring you that much closer to thinking about quitting the “day job” so many web developers hate, anyway.

Although I haven’t come across what seemed to be a highly profitable install of either ClassiPress of JobRoller, it could happen in the coming years as the scripts mature and offer exciting options which help differentiate it from the competition.

It would be wise to buy your access to these themes while they’re still quite affordable because over time, the membership price could go up as the value of the themes rise.

The AppThemes developers are geographically far from one another but it seems to work well for them as the look of the themes is both elegant and distinctive while the coding is relatively strealined, with the remaining bugs actively being work out.

AppThemes adds value to WordPress and as such, any serious developer will at least want to keep an eye on what they’re developing, like Clipper for coupons, Vantage as a highly visual business directory and Sage, a how-to WP app.

It is to be expected that more companies, akin to AppThemes, will pop-up offering nicely presented themes but for the moment, they are pretty much “it”.