Blair Williams

Everything is an Experiment

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10 Hidden Problems with Most WordPress Themes

10 Hidden Problems with Most WordPress Themes

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circuit_deathMost WordPress Themes suck! I'm not kidding. I've tried hundreds of WordPress Themes (free and premium) and most of them look great at first … I'll think a theme looks clean, beautiful and professional — then I install it, have a look under the hood and realize that it has fatal flaws.

This really makes me wonder how many people are slaving away on their websites and blogs all the while their site is dying a slow death because of a WordPress Theme that they think is fine.

When most people think about WordPress themes, they think of graphics. How good does the theme look? Will the theme make my business stand out? Will the theme help me feel good when people see my website? Will the SEO audit services that I hire find it easy enough to integrate with their strategies? The fact is, none of this will matter if your theme is preventing your audience from finding your site.

It's important to know that a WordPress Theme is much more than just graphics — themes are at the heart of how your customers and Google experience your website and it's critical for your business to make sure this experience is excellent.

The main idea behind this article is to help you make a good decision when you're choosing a Theme for your website. After suffering through these issues myself I've finally bucked up the money to pay for the Thesis WordPress Theme which successfully avoids almost every single one of these problems:

  1. Not Widget Enabled — Widgets are dynamic blocks of code that usually appear in the sidebars of your Website. They make it possible to add polls, list recent comments, place ads, etc. If your Theme isn't Widget enabled then you lose out on these features and if you want anything in your sidebars you have modify your theme's php files directly (which we don't want to have to do).
  2. Comment Formatting Sucks — In the world of Web 2.0, comments are *absolutely* critical. It's extremely important to attract comments to your blog posts and to start a conversation with your audience. If your Theme doesn't do a good job of making commenting easy, showing avatars, or formatting comments then you're site will be dead in the water.
  3. No Comment Template At All — I downloaded some really beautifully designed free themes a couple of weeks ago and was shocked to find out that comments didn't appear anywhere. A surprising number of WordPress Themes I've installed still don't support Comments AT ALL!? Seriously, before you settle on a theme, at least try to comment on some posts and see how it handles them — because if you download one of these jewels, you'll see pretty quickly that its not the theme for you.
  4. Comments Not Enabled on Pages — Most themes show comments on Posts but some don't allow the option of Comments on Pages. Even if the box is checked to “Allow Comments” on the Discussion tab when editing a page — these themes won't show them.
  5. No Landing Page Templates — I don't know of a Theme in existence that does this out of the box. I always have to add custom pages to the theme manually later on — it would be a great feature for a theme to include some alternate page templates to use for landing pages.
  6. Bad HTML Practices — Clean HTML is important for the performance and function of your site, not to mention how Google looks at your site.
  7. Too Much Javascript Loading — Some WordPress themes love to load every Javascript library in existence and implement a ton of unnecessary Javascript. This can make your site sluggish or downright slow.
  8. Poor HTML Formatting — Even some of the best looking free themes out there haven't taken into consideration the formatting of text. Most of them have a bizzare way of handling bullet lists, <code> blocks and blockquotes. They don't get line spacing at all and sometimes use bizarre colors and fonts for headers. Yeah, this stuff won't kill you but it can make you look like an idiot.
  9. Incomplete Header and Footer Templates — If your theme doesn't have complete footer and header templates then many plugins won't work. Case in point, I had to modify a theme last month so that the Google Analyticator plugin would actually work. Google Analyticator is great but the theme was missing some required code for it to put my tracking code at the footer of the site.
  10. Bad SEO Practices — SEO is uber-important when marketing a website. Many WordPress themes violate every rule of SEO in the book … one of the most pervasive issues is their use of h1 & h2 tags as formatting elements rather than as guideposts to important titles. Unique and properly used H1 tags are one of the most important elements of your site that Google looks at. For Google to index your site properly you should have an an exclusive strategist look at exactly 1 unique h1 tag per page and unique h2 tags for sub titles. The only theme I've ever seen that handles these properly is Thesis.

So now you've got a WordPress theme that does everything you want but may not look very good — does that mean your site is consigned to look like crap? Look, I know my site isn't the most visually stunning website in the world (at the time this post was written I'm just using the default look & feel of Thesis) — but at some point it will experience a profound transformation which will make it look great too. That's another benefit of Thesis — it enables you to easily customize your CSS & images to make your site look any way you want. You don't necessarily need Thesis though — you can actually customize any theme — it just may take a bit more work.

As long as you have a good, SEO optimized theme and good content you can do very well with your marketing efforts — many people read blogs via RSS anyway so they won't be physically visiting your site anyway. Maintaining a website is all about constant daily improvement so you can obsess about your graphics later — along with me.

Launch Your Website Today!

Launch Your Website Today!

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building_wwwOne of the biggest mistakes that online businesses make is not to put a marketing website up until after they have they have their product, service, graphics or brand launched and utterly perfected. Well, those things are important but shouldn't stop you from building your website today. It's extremely important to get your website up and running sooner rather than later — even before your product launches. Because if you have no marketing efforts in place then you have no customers and if you have no customers then you have no money — and that is a sad place to be.

If You Build it They Will Come … uh

What a load of crap! I recently had a client show me growth projections for their product after it was to launch — it showed exponential growth on day 1 and they had no marketing site up! These guys obviously didn't hit their sales projections by a long shot but once they started actively marketing they were alright. This just illustrates that there's a big misconception out there among people who haven't ever tried to promote a website that once you put a website on the Internet it is like flipping a switch and your site is immediately flooded with visitors lining up to buy your product — this is simply not true. If you think about it — there are billions of websites on the Internet, most of them clamoring for attention — why is anyone going to care about your little website when it launches?

The reality is that it takes time to build an effective website with a high volume of traffic — sometimes months, sometimes years. You have to give yourself time for the right Audience to find your site and for a community to come together on it. You have to have time to submit articles, get involved on other related sites, build reciprocal linking relationships, test landing pages, etc. You may have the greatest product, service or message in the world but if you don't get any attention then your business will fail — and despite what any so called Marketing expert tells you, it takes a rock solid plan, a lot of hard work and some money to drive traffic to your site.

I attended a seminar a few months ago where a prominent blogger talked about the success he's seen on his site. He started blogging in 2005 and before his blog hit its stride it only had about 30 visitors a day for 2 and a half years! He loved what he was talking about on his blog though and eventually it began building momentum. His blog currently sees hundreds of thousands of visitors a month and he makes his living from the community he's established. Now that is an extreme example but it shows that you need to be patient, continue to improve your site daily and find ways to promote your site on the Internet.

Don't Build a Website … Build a Community

Really, when you think about it — building a website doesn't matter nearly as much as building a community of people around you that love what your doing — or at least have strong opinions about what you're doing. This is why you want to launch a site that enables you to start the discussion with your audience.

Don't worry so much about what people will say on your site … If you launch your site using WordPress or any other CMS worth its salt you should be able to moderate any comments coming in. Trust me, I've launched sites dealing with very sensitive topics and it always amazes me how being sincere and helpful on your site can lead to some great comments when you're targeting the right audience. It has been my experience that visitors to your site won't comment on a post unless they are interested in it or are angered by it (you may have to moderate some of those) — so you won't typically get as many negative comments as you think you will starting off.

Once you have a people who are interested in your message coming to your site and interacting with each other you'll naturally see links and pingbacks coming back to your site from people talking about your site on Twitter, Digg, Forums or other websites. This kind of organic promotion is critical to your long term success — if your message is good enough for people to care about what you're doing then they will promote you, how cool is that!

Build the Community First — A Case Study

A buddy of mine is consulting with a startup who has done it right. This startup will be selling a physical product that will help keep kids safe — so they have a message that people actually care about. They are still in product development right now but rolled out their marketing site several months ago. They now have hundreds of people who have commented on their blog, thousands of people on their email list, an active affiliate program with over 2,000 affiliates and are even generating revenue on their site by accepting pre-orders for their product. The crazy thing about this company is that they just used a template for the graphics on their site (and their blog is just the WordPress default theme), haven't even established the final graphics for their logo — yet they've been generating revenue for months now — and their product won't even launch until August!

If you're waiting for your graphics to be perfect, your product to be complete, a “killer” flash piece for the front page or anything else — don't. Get your website online today and start building your community now. No website is perfect on day 1 — its virtually impossible to get the message right and make it as effective as it can be instantly. What matters when launching a website is that you are committed to making daily, incremental changes based on the data coming in from your community (analytics, comments, surveys, etc) and you'll have a killer website that actually turns a profit!