2 Responses

1. Blogosopher » Blog Archive » Bad WordPress themes aren’t always obvious

   January 22nd, 2006 at 10:31 am

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   [...] One of the biggest overlooked problems with Word Press really isn’t a fault of WordPress: bad themes. Because it is so easy to modify a theme, to customize the look, many people do- and then post their theme for others to download. Doing this can be an act of kindness- or have some ulterior motives- such as including a link back to the theme builders site- or even semi evil- by including code that delivers ad words proceeds to the theme builder. In general, people who post themes have good intentions and there are a lot of very good themes out there. But- what are the deciding factors that make a theme good or bad? This is not meant to be a comprehensive look- just some examples of what can and can’t go wrong with a theme. One major problem with theme builders is that they often find a theme they like and then tweak it to their liking without thoroughly knowing what happened before. It’s sort of like the communication game “Telephone” where you start with a long sentence and whisper it to the person next to you, who then does the same- and by the time it pass through a dozen people it may not mean the same thing. Themes can go through a horrible genetic mutation process, from just minor changes to images to accidentally deleting important tools and then being morphed again. A version history- or at least an acknowledgement of where a theme builder started would be a huge help. We are in the process of building a list of best themes for WordPress- by evaluating themes we believe do the best job or offer the easiest to customize. Watch this site for more on this soon. Feature sets: there are a lot of “tools” in WordPress for a theme builder to utilize- some are totally worthless. My personal peeve is against the calendar- it takes up valuable screen real estate to inform readers what dates you posted on. The good thing is it’s easy to remove from the sidebar- but it’s a leftover from the early days of blogging when everyone was trying to push frequency over quality. The next three are coding issues and are ranked on how easy to hard they are to spot: Easy to spot: A theme (probably left over from 1.2) that didn’t support Permalinks (the ability to click on a posts headline and get a static URL that will always point to that post). A little harder to spot: A theme that didn’t tell you there were more results in your category than the default number shown by your settings in options. You may have 100 posts in that category, but it will only display the first 10 results with no way to see the rest. To find this out- you need more than your default number of posts shown in a category. Hard to spot- and literally makes WordPress worthless: The theme, Blue Horizon, generates search results for Google that are identical- instead of showing the actual contents of the post- it puts your blogs tagline in the content area. See the screen grab below (click to enlarge) [...]

2. Chris Demeyere » Nieuw design site

   July 27th, 2006 at 10:19 am

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   [...] U had het al gemerkt, de website heeft een nieuwe look. Het thema zelf is een behoorlijk aangepaste versie van Blue Horizon met wat extraatjes om het nog meer “mijn” blog te maken. Mijn foto is verdwenen en ik twijfel nog of die terugkomt of niet. [...]