YOOtheme, to Template or not to Template

Q. I have been looking for an affordable joomla solution to replace my existing flash based website. Joomla appears to be my answer. Woo Hoo! Only 1,000 questions to go. I really like some yootheme.com templates and particularly CHROME. But for the life of me I cannot find an Ask Us or Email Us on yootheme anywhere. All i wanted to know is how much can you modify them. I want a large banner, logo etc. This theme doesnt have one. I also want to use a lead enquiry form (yet to be built) and place it right in center of the the front page. Lastly, all the demo displays show a dog eared yootheme in the top corner, can I safely assume that this is not in the purchased template. Sorry to bother you with what is obviously a support question from someone elses website, but i found you on google for your article on CHROME.

A. I also like the YOOtheme and I have several sites using their templates. I have a yearly club membership which I purchased almost a year ago. They are expensive, but offer much more than most other template clubs with their YOOtools extensions and MooTools effects. They make excellent use of JavaScript, CSS and image transparencies, but their templates are a bit image-heavy and create way too many download requests for CSS, scripts, images, etc.

I am VERY impressed with the professional job they do on the backend. Their CSS is organized extremely well and template or CSS changes really aren't that difficult to make. I've made several small changes on a few sites. One thing to watch out for is their templates with the gradient background images behind the header (mostly the older templates) because if you want to change the header height you'll have to do some Photoshop work to get things lined up correctly. I believe the newer templates are better about this, but it is something that the YOOtheme designers should keep in mind.

The dogear image in the top corner can easily be removed, or you can change the image to your own. It really shouldn't be hard to add an image banner, their code is so well written and organized that you'll be able to figure it out even if you're not a PHP programmer.

YOOtheme is a little slow to respond to support issues, but that's to be expected from a small design firm growing at the rate they are. You'll occasionally get a response from another template club member as well.

Their templates also seem to be getting just a little bit stale, as they still haven't moved out of their standard layout. They do excellent work, but it's time to break their cookie-cutter design pattern and start making some new layouts. 

Overall, I would definitely recommend the YOOtheme template club. They do excellent design and development work and they are moving in a good direction. You shouldn't have any problems with the changes you want to make.

You may also want to look into RocketTheme and JoomlaJunkie. I haven't personally used either of these, but their templates look pretty good.