Comments on: 99.5 Percent Of All Wordpress Themes Suck

By: Da Brazilian Gangsta

Da Brazilian Gangsta — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 08:01:10 +0000

I agree with the title of this post. Most of them simply suck. :(

By: 5 Awesome Designs That Need To Be Made Into Wordpress Themes | Jim Kukral - Marketing Ideas Online

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 02:22:15 +0000

[...] Awesome, awesome stuff. These designs are amazing, and they need to be made into Wordpress themes, because as I’ve said before, 99.5% of the Wordpress themes (the free ones) out there suck. [...]

By: andrew wee

andrew wee — Tue, 15 May 2007 09:36:41 +0000

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.

By: Marketing Drome

Marketing Drome — Mon, 14 May 2007 17:42:23 +0000

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.

By: Jim Kukral

Jim Kukral — Mon, 14 May 2007 14:00:15 +0000

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.

By: Sam Harrelson

Sam Harrelson — Mon, 14 May 2007 13:52:53 +0000

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!

By: Jim Kukral

Jim Kukral — Mon, 14 May 2007 13:33:06 +0000

@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.

By: DarrinW

DarrinW — Mon, 14 May 2007 13:27:38 +0000

Jim, look forward to seeing your new layout if you do get one :)

By: TDH

TDH — Mon, 14 May 2007 06:50:34 +0000

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…

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Sun, 13 May 2007 00:00:49 +0000

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-guide-to-semantic-markup.php