I hate my theme now (dated May 11, 2007). It’s my own custom work based on Akon. So i don’t blame Akon really… I blame me for my customization. It was meant to be temporary.
Being a former website designer, I often go through this dilemma. I like something at first, then hate it two months later. And I’m picky too. I look around at all the free wordpress themes out there and they suck. Only a select few are really unique and highly customizable. And those few are VERY hard to find.
I should just drop the $3-5k to have my own custom design done, but I’m not ready to. So yeah, it’s my fault for being cheap when I could just be like Yaro and go custom and be bad-ass.
Anyone have any themes that you care to share that you love? White space is a huge factor.
I think I might just go super minimal and work up slowly.
Jim -
Give me a holla! Maybe I can be of help. ;)
Actually from an SEO & loading order perspective I don’t like Yaro’s theme, because the header links and left sidebar load before the content.
Andy, I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t agree with your assessment that design has much to do with seo at all. Sure, it does do small stuff, but no, I haven’t seen any evidence to show me that good quality content is in any way hindrance’d by an improper blog layout.
Good content wins, period. Now if your content stinks, then yeah, maybe you need to have a special built seo theme :)
@Terry, pinged! Thanks yo! Can’t wait to see what you come up with.
Well of course it is important to have all your sidebar content, advertising and widgets load before your content.
His page doesn’t have an H1 heading, so the first heading that the google spider sees is “Featured Sites”
When Revenews appears in Megite (or at least appeared, no article up there to check atm), what was typically seen was the picture and bio from the left hand column. Spiders have difficulty parsing pages that have the left column first.
Sites using widgets in their sidebars experience horrible problems with loading time of their content if they don’t have the content first.
A VC used to have this problem, they don’t anymore. Last time I looked, Marketing Pilgrim still had the problem, with both right hand sidebars loading first. I don’t know why spiders didn’t have problems finding the content.
If you are using a free theme, you get what you pay for. If you are paying for a custom theme for a good designer, you expect it to be well designed, not just look nice.
Yaro – it is not callous at all, there are so many things wrong with my own site markup currently and I just haven't fixed it yet. Part of that is just general time restraints, part is because of gradual testing, and partly because each time I make a change, I want to use it as an example.
Any criticism I suppose can be directed to theme designers in general who don't think about these things.
Here is another interesting thread to read on some similar issues that are prevalent in most themes.
http://www.pearsonified.com/2007/04/definitive-gu…
This may seem callous – and I know my site could use more SE optimization – but I find if the links keep coming in to my site Google decides my content is great and ranks it well, no matter where it appears in my page layout and whether the syntax is perfect for SEO.
I have a list of tweaks I’d like to do to my design, but technically they are way beyond me. Theme design changes are not a priority at the moment, so I’ll just keep relying on good content to get me there. I’m happy enough just having a “bad-ass” design :)
You don’t have to dish out $3-5k for a great WordPress theme, Jim. There’s a bunch of talented designers that are willing to work for less than that. Be wary though, if you require special solutions you should go with a pro…
Jim, look forward to seeing your new layout if you do get one :)
@TDH… You’re right. But the ones that I know of charge that much. If you charge less, I’d like to know you :)
@Darrin… Yes, so do I! Terry has graciously decided to help me with a theme. Someday you might see something new up here.
I think it’s interesting that so many of the top Technorati 100 don’t seem to care about things such as design or templates. We’ve had this convo off blog, Jim… but it is interesting to me that Scoble, Winer, Godin and even Rubel rely on either minimalist design or WordPress.com/Typepad.com default styles. Scoble is still using a .wordpress.com site and he’s the king blogger.
I’ve gone hyper-minimalist with my personal blog and do enjoy the freedom and the white space. Not sure what to do with CPN, though…
Great topic!
Wow, your comment went through Sam! You must have gotten out of the Akismet bad karma ring.
I am a self admitted design snob and visual thinker. So design is very important to me and my brand, and what I consider to be important. I know that in reality design means nothing if the content is high-quality (Ex: Scoble/Winer), but in the back of my head, I want the full experience… I want a good design too.
I like minimalist too. My problem is I have so much stuff to showcase that I want to get it all into one design, and it’s impossible.
I have seen some wordpress themes that I thought were really excellent, but mine is not one of them. Like yours, it was meant to be temporary. I’m fine with that because the blog is more of my personal thought-dump than anything else (hence why I have no ads on it).
I have, however, been planning out a new blog and I would like to have a nice design for it. I just don’t want to plunk down all kinds of cash for a design. The best idea would probably be to learn how to do it myself so I don’t have to worry about whether or not the code is ordered properly, widget-friendly, etc.
I’d suggest to go with content, content, content.
Unless we’re professional designers, I don’t think a ‘pretty’ design should factor at all.
But the layout at least has to be intuitive and not leave me wondering where the heck the archives are at.
some basic stuff like sorting out your permalink structure, including commonsensical plugins like most popular posts and recent comments, into a decent template do it for me.
I agree with the title of this post. Most of them simply suck. :(