Unfortunately, there isn’t that many serious Virtuemart templates provider out there who are producing high quality Virtuemart themes. So I though I would share my experience and hopefully point you in the direction of finding the best of best. This article isn’t reviewing Virtuemart template providers, but more concerned with my experience of developing e-commerce websites using Joomla / Virtuemart templates.

Shape 5

I have personally used a number of Shape 5 templates for Joomla and Virtuemart. Currently, Shape 5 have three Virtuemart templates available. All three are not free but certainly worth the money. Shape 5 have utilised the demo sites for each template to provide guidance and instruction on setting up the template.

1. Your Store. This template is very customisable and has 21 module positions, and 20 colour variations.

2. eMerchantilism. This template has 19 module positions and various menu styles and colour variations.

3. Shopper Frenzy. This is my personal favourite of the three. I recently used this template to build www.gemmsdream.com. This template boasts 23 module positions and various menu styles.

VJ Templates

Probably the largest provider that I have found of Virtuemart templates. Currently, they have 30 templates covering many categories and theie design style can be observed in most of their templates. The only draw back is you can only use the template on one site; however, the documentation provided with the template is very comprehensive and their online forum is also very helpful.

I have only used one template from this site: www.homefurniturewarehouse.co.uk.

Template Monster

At the moment there are ten Virtuemart templates listed here covering a number of popular categories. They do offer a buy out fee of several thousand dollar, which I personally think it way too much to own the template outright. I haven’t personally used any templates from here, so if any has it would be great to hear your views.

Ice Theme

Ice Themes only have produced one Virtuemart template called The Store 2. I am unsure whether there ever was a Store 1, as it doesn’t appear on their site. The design of the template very much follows the Ice Theme styling of their Joomla templates. I personally have never used this template; however, I hope to get my hands dirty with this one in the near future.

Mall WP

I came across this website be chance whilst actually writing this article via Google Alert keyword Virtuemart. They predominantly provide WordPress themes, and only have one Virtuemart template called Top Shop. Normally, this templates is sells for $40; however, at the moment they have it for $5. Bargin!

I know this never going to be an exclusive list, so if you do find other Virtuemart template providers, please let me know and I’ll take a look.

I was browsing around the web the other day looking for some guidance, advice and tutorials on taking a web design from Photoshop and coding the design for WordPress. Having spent a good hour of browsing I came across http://www.psd2cssonline.com. Basically, this web site automatically converts your Photoshop PSD file into css, xhtml or templates for Joomla or WordPress once you have applied the relevant slices to the PSD design. I thought immediately, what a fantastic resource, and something that will save so many people a huge amount of time coding sites by hand (so to speak). Promptly, I booked mark this site and it into my list of ‘things to do’ for writing a blog, in the hope that this will add some further awareness of this fantastic resource.

As yet I haven’t tested the site, so I cannot write a review on how it works; however, I’m sure I will once I’ve had the opportunity to test it out. Certainly though, looking at the samples provided on the web site, it appears to work well.