Sell Photos is a theme that’s all about it’s name. Sell Photos was specially crafted to help you market, promote and showcase your photography in a bold, simple, clean and crystal clear website. Sell Photos is about more than it’s design though, it’s about enabling you to build a photography business with a simple, sleek and modern website that has the powerful options you need to grow your brand and your business.  Sell Photos is a theme that doesn’t let it’s own design get in the way of delivering memorable content, since the design stands in the background, letting your photos, videos or other visual content take center stage.

Sell Photos lets you create your own iStockPhoto clone!

One aspect that you absolutely must have in a website these days is responsiveness.  Sell Photos, fortunately, is completely responsive on any device.  That means no matter how your customers access your site, it’ll look amazing and deliver consistent results, time after time.  Responsive themes tend to rank better, all things considered, which is great for building your traffic and expanding your business.  In today’s competitive market, you really have to have a responsive website.  Like the name implies, you can sell photographic prints or downloads with this theme, thanks to the integrated Sell media plugin, from GraphPaper Press.  (You can also sell eBooks for devices like a Kindle, or even audio or video files like MP3 or MP4.)  Basically, anything that can be downloaded is easy enough to sell with Sell Media.  One great thing is, it’s an all in one solution.  Since GraphPaper Press created the theme, if you run into any troubles with using the theme or the plugin itself, it can easily be remedied, using the fast and in-depth support options.

So, it’s been a year now since I first reviewed Sell Photos.  I’ll say this much, I’ve learned a ton about WordPress since the first time I reviewed it.  I’ve come to have an even greater appreciation for themes that are completely coded from the ground up, not leaning on crutches to get the job done.  I’m happy to note that Graph Paper Press has done a great job of creating this theme without leaning heavily on something like Visual Composer.

From the makers of another very popular theme called Aurum, this one is called Kalium.  These theme names sound like Superman’s clumsy, weak, stupid, lazy, relatively powerless cousins or something.  But that has nothing to do with Laborator’s massive hit theme, Kalium.

Kalium is more like Kal El than anything else.

This is one of the most popular themes ever on ThemeForest with over 17000 downloads and counting.  Still going strong after a few years on the market, Kalium is worth a look for professional and creative websites where visual style and stability are what’s needed most.

With support for WooCommerce and really any other eCommerce plugin, Kalium works great as an online shop.  I’m seeing a fashion store, tech store selling cool gadgets or even an SaaS store with digital downloads.

Here’s a look at some of the demo thumbnails.

Gotta take a look at what the theme developer has to say about Kalium.

Kalium is a creative WordPress theme that will showcase your Portfolio, Agency, Photography, Travel Agency, Corporate, Business, Fitness Center, Restaurant, Medical, Construction, Product Landing page, Education site or your just a Blog, just everything is possible with Kalium. With stacks of layout designs, user-friendly Theme Options and rich Drag and Drop content builder to help create your perfect site in minutes, you can use it as a Multipurpose theme too so you can build whatever you like with this template. Kalium is well organized, visually stunning and constantly evolving through theme updates.

Okay, so a creative theme, nice work.

So, what’s the good and the bad?  Well, I think like all of their themes, Laborator does a wonderful job supporting their themes. I’ve scoured the internet and it’s difficult to find anybody who’s had anything bad to say about these guys.  And there’s not even many complaints about Kalium itself.  I think the 4.91 rating on ThemeForest is a pretty good indicator of the quality of this theme.  Customization is easy, the native WordPress theme options panel is put to good use here.  Anything can be changed with ease, so a custom look for your site is a definite possibility.  Kalium is responsive, retina ready and looks great with high quality HD resolution images.

Then, there’s the eCommerce setup.  It’s simple and looks great.  Have a read…

Create the shopping experience that you have been waiting for without all the bloat! Kalium works very well with industry standard plugin WooCommerce and offers full eCommerce support. It will knock your socks off with its sophisticated abilities and professional layouts made especially for WooCommerce. It features a ton of options for you to give users the ultimate shopping experience.

Good stuff.

Now, the bad.  Visual Composer.  It’s such a slow, terrible plugin.  I hate it.  But, there’s nothing that says you have to use it, right?  Avoid the bloat.  Other bads, they’ve bundled two really, really heavy sliders into the theme.  Revolution and Layer sliders are both massive plugins, too large for most sites in my opinion.  Plenty of other sliders can do the job with way less bloat.

Checking in with one of the most expensive price tags I’ve ever seen, $200, Builder better bring the features, the design and the all-around awesomeness like few others.  In fact, the only theme I can think of that’s more than this one is called Pile, which runs $225 per license.  Pile is maybe worth it, at least it’s close.  We’ll have to see about Builder.

So, what do you get for your $200?

Well, for one thing, you get a theme that has recently been re-built from the ground up.  A complete revival of the original theme we reveiwed over a year ago.  They’ve added tons of new features that will hopefully justify that hefty price tag.  It’s still based on Bootstrap, which is good.  Bootstrap themes tend to load up fast and look good too.

The support is 24/7/365, which is nice.  Who knows when and where you’ll be if things suddenly need to be fixed on your site.  Anything can happen and it usually does.  So, that’s a big checkbox in the ‘recommend’ category.

Builder is responsive, which should go without saying, it’s also retina ready.  WooCommerce is totally supported, meaning you can build a fancy WordPress web store of your own.  One negative, this theme is now built on Visual Composer, which is a lame copout and a terrible, bloated and un-fun plugin that I don’t like.

But to make this an insult sandwich, here are some more great things about builder.  Multiple blog styles, multiple portfolio styles.  Unlimited colors and sidebars too.  Demo data is included for rapid deployment of your new site.  There are a pair of boxed layouts and a pair of widescreen layouts.  Three bold home page styles and a lot more.

Builder is still a great theme, but I worry that that value just isn’t there at a $200 price tag.

So, I decided to check this theme out on Pingdom to see how fast it loaded.  Not great results.

The performance grade is great, meaning they’ve properly set things up in terms of caching, minimizing redirects and all that, but 119 requests?  A load time over 12 seconds?  That’s horrible and for a page that’s only 2.1 MB, that’s really, really slow.

I blame Visual Composer.