*This is not a sponsored review*
Dishing out bags of money can help, but if you dig around a little deeper, there are truly some hidden gems to be found online. We’re talking about design, themes, banners and buttons. Ever tried to find a quality banner designer, who didn’t try to either rip you off for $30 per banner or a complete n00b that just fired up MS paint and tries to sell you a bahahanner (pun intended) for $10? Obviously there’s a matter of taste, banners we like might not appeal to you, but we’ve had a look at banner performance on our blog, and we’ve found that one designer in particular has always delivered top notch banners, which also happen to have the highest click through rate on the blog.

Sharing is caring, and we figured we’d let you guys in on it. Eli has done a few banners for us in the past, but has also done work for others like Blogperfume and the OIOPublisher plugin guys. You can find his banner portfolio here. We believe that a mere $12,50 for a great banner with a high CTR isn’t doing Eli’s work justice. Got a crappy 125×125 Entrecard avatar? Go see Eli!

Right, thats banners covered, on with the themes. Some of you might have already found Fresh Press Themes, which is designed and owned by the designer of our own theme, Hyder. He has recently started working on FPT, and so far he’s managed to squeeze two excellent free wordpress themes out of his creative genius.

He’s committing himself to deliver three free fresh themes per month, which is pretty awesome if you ask us. Be sure not to miss his new themes when they come out, sign up to his RSS feed and stay informed.

*PS If you’re wondering why our own banner is showing up in our sidebar every now and again, its because we’re experimenting with 125exchange.com, and it seems we’ve broken it already