Instigator Blog - Latest Comments in 5 Things to Avoid in WordPress Themes

Re: 5 Things to Avoid in WordPress Themes

hoodiaweightloss — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:40:17 -0000

Wanted to compliment on your site, it looks really good .

Hank

Re: 5 Things to Avoid in WordPress Themes

Ben Yoskovitz — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 13:48:17 -0000

Egon - I think a lot of theme designers abandon themes. It's understandable - they do it for free, they've got tons of other projects to work on, etc. But it's still tough for someone using it.

And with the WP upgrade to 2.1 it makes it even tougher. You may be able to get someone to help you with the upgrade though, and make sure the theme works properly...If you need any help/advice on that email me (contact info is available on the site.)

Re: 5 Things to Avoid in WordPress Themes

egon — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 19:26:44 -0000

After I chose my theme and spent days customizing it (www.AutomoBlog.net,) the author announced that he will no longer be working on it or releasing updates. That sucks, but I taught my self enough PHP and CSS to do what I need, so it's no big deal. The only problem is I can't upgrade to Wordpress 2.1 now; I've heard other people using this theme had problems.

Re: 5 Things to Avoid in WordPress Themes

Collis — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 22:10:33 -0000

Well beauty is in the eye of the beholder right?

Indeed it is! Which is unfortunate for all concerned when it comes to Myspace pages! :-)

Actually Myspace is an excellent example of when a site succeeds *despite* its design shortcomings

Re: 5 Things to Avoid in WordPress Themes

Ben Yoskovitz — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 21:02:00 -0000

Thanks for the comments guys.

Dawud -- Knowing what you're going to do with pages is definitely important. Lots of themes are restrictive when it comes to pages - for example, they don't look good when you list a lot of them (often this is the case with themes that put pages horizontally across the top somewhere.)

Collis -- Well beauty is in the eye of the beholder right? Sure, some things are just plain ugly though...

Josh -- That's an interesting recommendation, 2 columns vs. 3. I like 2 columns, but 3 works too. It's partially a personal preference thing, partially an issue of what you're trying to accomplish with the blog. I DO think that 3 columns can compound issues of messy coding, restrictive coding, etc.

Re: 5 Things to Avoid in WordPress Themes

Josh Kenzer — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 20:02:11 -0000

One recommendation I would make is 2 column vs 3 column. It can be very difficult to convert a 2 column to a 3 column and vise versa. Try to pre-think which would work better for you and choose that from the get go.

Re: 5 Things to Avoid in WordPress Themes

Collis — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:18:54 -0000

If i may, there is one other thing to avoid in WordPress themes...

6. *Ugly Themes.* The designer may think they have created a masterpiece, but it isn't necessarily so! Some themes are just ugly... You may very well succeed with an ugly template, but it won't do you any favours.

:-)

Re: 5 Things to Avoid in WordPress Themes

Dawud Miracle — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 13:43:12 -0000

I have one other criteria that I find important when choosing a WP Theme...I like to know how if and how I'm going to use 'Pages' in WP before finding a theme. Many themes either leave out Pages or make it difficult to have more than a few Pages. And since I often setup WP for people as CMS, having flexibility with Pages is important to me.

Re: 5 Things to Avoid in WordPress Themes

KWiz — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 13:15:04 -0000

Because of this post, I view my choice of theme as absolutely great! I don't know about code or too few or too many files (at least not yet), but my theme gets updated, has support, and is very flexible. Thanks so much for this post!