About

In early 2008, I started considering ways I could both contribute to the WordPress community in a meaningful way, as well as involve designers and users in the process as well.

Elevate is a community effort towards the upward movement of WordPress themes.  In the last year, the free WordPress theme market has been overshadowed by premium themes.  Premium theme developers were innovating, creating both asthetically pleasing and highly functional themes, the likes of which had yet to be seen.

And I wanted to bring these premium-quality designs and features to the WordPress community for free.

I’m talking about highly innovative themes with creative designs that match anything you’ve seen before.

Giving Back

Elevate operates on the philosophy that WordPress users are altruistic … they want to help the platform they use to succeed.  Many WordPress users are great designers, but have (until now) been limited in the methods for contributing to the WordPress community.  With Elevate, they now have the opportunity to submit designs for coding and release to the community.

Also, through our Premium Membership site, users are able to offer support to other users in need of a helping hand. I know many people who would much rather help out on a forum like ours rather than the mammoth WordPress.org user support forums.

The Business Model

I thought long and hard for ways to monetize this site in order to maintain long-term growth and the continual release of high-quality WordPress themes.  Here’s how Elevate generates revenue.

1. We charge for Premium Membership which offers several benefits such as support, documentation, and tutorials.

2. We sometimes release themes with non-obtrusive, completely un-spammy sponsorships.  An organization pays us to include an ad on our release page and on the theme options screen of the theme.

3. We offer great hosting through our affiliates.

4. Donations. As always, if you use a theme from Elevate, we would be happy to accept any donations via any theme release page.

How Can You Help?

As mentioned above, donations are welcome.  But we also would love to have volunteers help users in the forum.  Also, talented designers are encouraged to submit designs for future themes.  Credit will be given for your work.

So take our themes for a test drive! We hope you enjoy!

-Nathan Rice