It’s taking me an age to get this blog up and running, and it’s all to do with finding a decent free WordPress theme.

Sure, I could buy myself a premium WordPress theme, but many of those are rubbish, made by theme hackers and copiers who really don’t have a clue what they are doing, and some of the free themes are much nicer anyway.

The problem with free WordPress themes is that more and more people are deciding to make WordPress blog themes just to get backlinks for their main sites, or at least to get traffic to them.

Now, I have nothing against leaving attribution links in the footer of a WordPress theme – after all, someone went to the trouble to make it and saved me a load of grief.  But I do object to the footer being filled with loads of spammy links which bear no relevance to my blog, or even to the theme itself.

There are some beautiful free WordPress themes out there which I would love to use (many are SEO friendly too, which is always a plus, as many aren’t), but so many of them contain at least three links to totally irrelevant websites.

For example, if I am making a ‘babe blog’, the last thing I want to be linking to is a garden centre site, but a couple of pretty themes I found do just that, even though the themes themselves are ‘pretty girl’ oriented.  WTF?

And then there are all the ‘make money’ hopefuls, who design, or modify loads of themes to be ‘SEO Friendly’…and then stick at least three links on the bottom to their ‘how to make money’ sites.  Yeah sure, I really want my cash-strapped readers going to your website and closing mine, in the misguided hope you are going to help them make a buck.

Even worse are the ‘SEO WordPress themes’  which insist on telling your readers that the theme is designed to rank high in the search engines’.  I’m sure Google et al would be really pleased to know that your blog doesn’t have its main intention as being interesting to your readers – it is all about getting to the top of the search engines.

And yes, I know that, in practice, that is where we all would like to be, but why be so damn blatant about it?

But despite all this, you finally find a good, workable free WordPress theme – a reasonable attribution links and it still looks nice and acts nice too… until you test it out and find that the sidebars slip all over the place, whatever you try with the CSS the fonts still don’t work properly, your images won’t align the way you want them to, and, for those hung up about widgets – not only is it not widgetized, but trying the ‘fix’ for this breaks the bloody theme!

And that’s the stage I am at this moment in time…

I really don’t mind not having widgets – I’ve learned enough by now not to need them.  But it would be nice to know for sure that any other little ‘fix’ I need to use along the line, doesn’t break the theme either.  Especially once I have done all the non-widgetized sidebar work.

Ok, rant over.

Perhaps next time I’ll post a ‘babe picture’.  I’m sure it’ll have a much more positive affect than this wall of words rant about free WordPress themes

Addition:

I was googling for ways to edit this theme and discovered this: Hidden Spam Links In Wordpress Themes

The guy is going on about ‘hidden links to gambling and porn’, and, as usual, linking porn to’bad neighbourhoods’ (it is, if it’s on your non-adult blog, like his, but not if it’s on an adult blog like mine). But that post was very helpful anyway, as it showed that his copy of the very theme I am using on this site (in case I change it later, it is the ‘I Feel Dirty’ theme) had some pretty nasty code inserted in the functions file and the footer.

As it turned out, the theme used on this blog – downloaded from the designer’s site, is clean. He had downloaded from one of those ‘free wordpress themes’ sites which display loads of different themes, and it appears the ‘nasty’ had been inserted in the code there. His description of how he found it is a very helpful read.

And, of course, validates my rant about the problems of using free wordpress themes.

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