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10 Hidden Problems with Most WordPress Themes

10 Hidden Problems with Most WordPress Themes

by Blair Williams · May 19, 2009

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.

Filed Under: Marketing, SEO, Software, Wordpress Tagged With: Comments, HTML, SEO, theme, Wordpress

5 Reasons Why WordPress Websites Are Better

5 Reasons Why WordPress Websites Are Better

by Blair Williams · Apr 17, 2009

wordpress_logoWordPress based websites are faster to setup, easier to maintain, easier to market and extend.

I've been developing websites for years and have used about every technology available for creating them. First of all, let me make a distinction — by “website” I mean any content driven website or blog — as opposed to a custom web application (I love using Ruby on Rails for functional webapps). I've used Perl/CGI, Java, Straight PHP, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, Ruby on Rails and python to develop content driven websites for myself and my clients … these all inevitably result in disaster because I (the programmer) have to continue to maintain and update these sites over time. Also, the client usually has feature requests that I then have to build for them — these features cost them money and suck away my time. Landing page builder wordpress is your way to success.

About 2 years ago I started messing around with WordPress and have been deploying WordPress based sites ever since — because they are simply better, here's why:

  1. WordPress is SolidWordPress is the basis for thousands of high-traffic websites and is now a refined, well-tuned app for creating websites. It's more solid than anything that a developer could create on a first try (yes, even me) because its been in the “wild” for years and has gone through many iterations.
  2. WordPress is SimpleSeriously, who likes working through FTP, SSH or a programmer to update files on their website? No one. WordPress has done a better job of making it easy for non-technical people to update and contribute to a website than any other technology I've seen. It's even made Theme & Plugin development really nice which is why there is a large and expanding number of them out on the web.
  3. WordPress has an Unbeatable Feature SetSome of my favorite built in feature like LifterLMS Review + Ultimate Guide – But is Worth It? (2021) are WordPress's rich text editor (that I'm using to write this blog post), media uploader (which allows you to upload multiple files at once), dynamic RSS feeds, category management, tagging and comment management. This is a well thought out, cohesive environment for managing a website.But what if you want your website to do that WordPress doesn't currently do with its built in features? I'd wager there's a plugin built for it. You can replace the graphics on your website in no time with WordPress's outstanding theme management or extend its feature set with a WordPress Plugin. There are plugins to help your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), release a Podcast, store all of your media files on Amazon S3, customize your login screen and even create shortlinks on your site (I wrote that one). Currently there are over 4,000 plugins and 700 themes that are listed at wordpress.org! But plugins do not suffice in achieving a healthy SEO, for you'd also need to select the right keywords and also include curated links in your websites. If you want your site to look good and do a lot in a short amount of time, you can't do any better than WordPress.
  4. WordPress is Easier to MaintainWhat if you have a custom website built by a programmer … who then decides not to work for you anymore? You are screwed — the ramp up time for another developer to come in and reverse engineer his code could be enough to send you reeling. But if you base your site on WordPress, you can easily find another developer to work on it … most freelance developers and graphic designers out there simply can't afford not to know their way around WordPress anymore.In addition to this benefit, WordPress has a built-in updating mechanism that pretty much puts updates on autopilot. Open-source developers around the world continually release updates to WordPress and its plugins for free — this is huge! If you hire someone to build your site, you have to pay them every time you need an update and you're pretty much guaranteed that you won't be commissioning developers to update your site with security patches. Let the WordPress developers do the heavy lifting–take advantage of their free work. The Scepter Marketing website helps you streamline your business processes and generate more revenue.
  5. WordPress is Open-Source!Not only is WordPress the absolute best system to base your website on but it's 100% open source and doesn't cost anything (free as in free speech and free as in free beer). This is great for me since I feel like there are very few software providers that actually give me the flexibility to do what I need to do who don't charge me an arm and a leg.

Does WordPress have any problems or limitations? Absolutely — it is an evolving application — but it is much better and cheaper than trying to get someone to build a content-based website from scratch for you.

Filed Under: Plugins, Software Tagged With: Open Source, plugin, theme, Wordpress

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