theme recommendations?

I am hoping that someone can steer me to where I can select an opencart theme. I have spent alot of time at the extension site trying to review themes but most of them do not have any comments or ratings. I purchased one that I liked, it had no comments or ratings, and after I purchased and installed it, it had too many issues. I would like to purchase another theme but this time would feel better about the purchase if others had reviewed or left comments.
I have been using the default theme since 2008 and would like something that is a little more creative than how I created my store. Nothing fancy, just an error free theme that is user friendly.

this is a tricky subject....

but i can tell you what you will need.

front end......
- the design on front end is as you require for your purposes. somet themes can get rather gaudy layouts. while i do like them looking pretty, i also much prefer something practical for the customer.
- performance should be fast and snappy. if it has stuff like slow loading for images, that would be great.
- ajax is nice too, so the customer rarely has to refresh their browser
- rather than having repetitive txt "add to cart" there are some themes that have 3 icons for products listed on the front page to add to cart/add to favourites/compare. when you hover over them, then it will display the txt e.g. "add to cart" etc. This makes better use of space and does not look clutter with repetitive text.

back end
- is designed to support bootstrap and vqmod. especially vqmod because 70% of the opencart plugins use it because it has the least impact on your site if anything goes wrong, because install/uninstall is easy just like on wordpress. the theme i bought does not require vqmod and has no support to get it installed. hence why i recommend getting from a theme developer that in their policy has it in their theme and will support you in it's installation.

- many features for modding your front end layout. some themes have crappy patchwork modding abilitys. yes they added a module to modify the front end, but some of these are very poorly designed and you can barely make the changes you want. The one i got is so buggy, and the support so slow and bad, now i get frustrated that i can't do some simple edits using their theme editor module. Some themes though have proper theme layout editors with a nice gui and very practical. You can edit pretty much everything on front end with ease. They achieve this either via free modules or their own.



for the backend example you can look at lexus theme which has this inbuilt themeing editor i talked about
http://themeforest.net/item/lexus-mega- ... me/5960349

Try cloning default/ into modified_default/ side by side in view/theme/, then fiddling little by little with yours. You have several elements you liked -- background, colors, spacing, whatever. List them (subtleties won't all occur to you at once). You actually can simulate enough of that to appear different, without upsetting how the default actually works. Moreover it will stay in the theme/ tree, where it already uses core files located in other directories. No expense, a bit of learnin' as you go, and no surprises that you can't back right out of. Make backups first and as you go.

http://www.themeforest.net is the best for themes!

Personally, if you know even a little about html and css, my best suggestion is starting with the default theme or another free one you like and modifying it yourself. This has the benefit of your knowing the code the best since you alter it and you know it will work perfectly as you can test it while you go.

I avoid like the plague any that have their own controller modules as these in my experience are most likely to modify the core code and break extensions you might want to add down the road. Yeah, having a controller in admin for colors and the like is nice and convenient, but you can do the same thing by modifying the css files and don't have to worry about a controller that might break something else down the road.