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Drupal Themes Becoming an Industry of Its Own

Drupal is a big business in its own right, but it’s also spawned a formidable industry of its own — template and theme retailers. The newest addition to the fold is TopNotchThemes, which has just launched its first all-Drupal high-end theme store. From what we’ve seen so far, it looks pretty promising.

TopNotchThemes is a startup, created by Collective Minds, that provides instantly downloadable Drupal themes with advanced features and professional, glossy looks aimed to make small business or organization sites look like they were custom designed by a pro.

They offer a wide, growing selection of themes, optimized and tweaked for different industries and personal needs.

“TopNotchThemes is a real milestone for the Drupal world: it’s a commercial template store whose designs are built with Drupal’s capabilities in mind. Their commitment to working with the community and their respect for Drupal’s GPL license are both critical,” says Jeff Eaton, developer for Lullabot and member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors.

The TopNotchThemes Drupal themes feature the following capabilities:

• Ability to include multiple configuration options to create different layouts
• Can be uploaded and enabled on a Drupal website in seconds
• Include built-in support for popular third-party modules
• Standards compliant
• Cross-browser/cross-platform compatibility
• SEO-friendly HTML markup

Drupal is a wildly popular Open Source CMS platform that’s estimated to be downloaded by over 100,000 people every month. While other commercial Drupal theme sites exist, the TopNotchThemes founders felt that they weren’t up to par. “Most (Drupal themes) are either recycled from other platforms or bland, generic themes,” noted co-founder Chris Fassnacht. “We wanted to offer something designed from the ground up with Drupal in mind, but with the personality, high attention to detail, and features usually only found in custom themes.”

TopNotchThemes is also providing a selection of Ubercart-enhanced e-commerce themes to help meet the growing business demand for Drupal. Ubercart is a popular Open Source online store package for Drupal that is quickly becoming a leader among open source e-commerce platforms.

Collective Minds, the team behind TopNotchThemes, is a creative duo who have been creating Drupal themes for such clients as Amnesty International and WITNESS since 2006. Prices range from the low US$ 200’s to the high US$ 300’s for the themes, and in the US$ 2-3k range for “buyouts”, which remove your purchased theme from their website, ensuring its uniqueness.

Visit TopNotchThemes for more info.

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