As for the sponsored theme business model, I’m okay with how Blogging Pro did it, which was to not require the sponsored link to stay and to inform the users beforehand. Also, Blogging Pro’s Insense theme has only one sponsored link.

I’d love to expand on this topic on my own blog, but I think readers are tired of it.

Where I don’t agree with the theme sponsorship movement:

- There are too many links within one sponsored theme. I’ve seen as much as five links, plus one author’s credit link in the footer.

- Most theme designers don’t inform users that their themes come with sponsored links.

- Even when there is a disclaimer, some people don’t know that theme sponsorship is page rank spam. To me, the author’s credit link isn’t spam because that’s simply there for credit, although it does receive the same page rank benefit. And of course, that makes no difference in Google’s eyes.

- Some theme designers are only creating themes in order to do theme sponsorship, which results in poorly designed themes that do the community no good at all. They’re not contributing; they’re making money. The Theme Viewer and WordPress theme community, in general, should not reward that kind of effort.

- Some people are porting open source templates to WordPress in order to do sponsored themes. What that means is that they’re making money off of designs that they didn’t come up with in the first place. How do you justify that you know?

If you want the WordPress theme community to grow positively and benefit the right people, the WordPress theme viewer website and other notable sites about wordpress themes, like weblogtoolscollection.com need to reward theme developers that are actually contributing to the community and discourage theme sponsorship that is not done correctly.

HOW TO IMPROVE THE THEME VIEWER:

- Make the update message on the front page conditional, which means to show it only on the front page or only on the first visit. It takes up too much space.

- If the adsense ads in the main column is getting high CTR, then leave it. I don’t mind a little adsense. If it’s not converting, then replace it with a CPM leaderboard, at the top. There’s many other ways to monetize. Don’t settle with Adsense.

- Bring back commenting. I think that was a mistake to remove commenting.

I do agree with getting rid of theme ratings. It did no good and some theme designers abuse it by rating their own themes.

- Convert to manually filtering themes from now on. Don’t let people keep uploading and publishing their themes on the Viewer instantly. Once you hit upload, your theme should go to a moderation panel (or some sort) for the theme Viewer’s manager to review. This is possible and will not take too much time because daily new themes doesn’t exceed 100.

HOW TO REWARD THEME DESIGNERS:

- For starter, once a theme has been reviewed for publishing, the theme viewer should feature it individually. That rewards the theme designer with some traffic for a well-done job and simultaneously promotes the IDEA of high quality themes. Why would I NOT put just a little more effort into my theme if I know that it will get featured individually?

- Same goes for sites like weblogtoolscollection.com, I don’t agree with their current format for featuring themes. But, I do understand that they’re trying to reward as many theme designers as possible, per day. Sorry to Mark for mentioning weblogtoolscollection so often, but your site is the best example of a notable blog that rewards theme designers with much needed traffic.

HOW TO PROMOTE GROWTH IN THE THEME COMMUNITY:

- Write better tutorials and give better support. We don’t need more themes right now. We need more high quality THEME DESIGNERS.

- Again, promote the IDEA of high quality themes. There are thousands of themes out there, another average quality one is nothing special. That’s not to say that it doesn’t take time and much frustration to put together an average theme.

- Run theme contests again. Give theme designers something to get excited about so they can contribute and get rewarded (better than usual).

- There should be a meeting place for theme designers to discuss, other than the wordpress.org support forums.

- After getting enough theme designers and high quality themes, promote the IDEA of skinnable themes. I believe that is the future. Most theme designers are already doing that. We all use our own system to quickly produce a wordpress theme. Why not work together on a general system of templates that everyone can modify, skin, and give support for. If we establish a general system like that, then bloggers wouldn’t have to ask support from specific theme designers. Imagine being able to get support from any theme designer, of your choosing, simply because you use the general core system of templates that theme designers (community wide) have adopted for all their themes.

Then from there, we can create documentations and even better tutorials based on that general system of templates to create even more theme designers, instead of more themes.

- Send a clear message to all sponsored theme designers that if they don’t do it correctly, it won’t be worth their time because no one is going to reward them for their themes, except for the sponsors, which would be a downward spiral for sponsored theme designers because sponsors aren’t going to sponsor themes that don’t get downloaded.