WP WordPress – Free Themes Price Tag
WP WordPress – Free Themes Can Be A Costly Mistake!
Since the 3rd of September 2009 I have tried two free WordPress themes on this blog & in the short space of 2 months discovered a major problem with both!
So ultimately we have to ask ourselves, are free WordPress themes actually worth the price you could eventually end up paying..?
Whilst it is true that WordPress currently has well over 1,000 free themes available to choose from & I have only tried 2 of them, I do think that a 100% failure rate is definitely cause for concern, especially when you consider that without the use of certain tools, these errors probably would have remained hidden & I would have struggled doggedly on, wondering why my sites were failing to rank well with the various search engines.
Theme Problems..?
Now I expect you are wondering which themes & more to the point what problems..?
1. BluMag Was the first theme to give me problems & what made it even more annoying was the fact I had been using this very same theme on another site for the previous 6 months. I had spent countless hours hacking and adjusting this theme to get it displaying exactly as I wanted, not that I am a coding guru by any stretch of the imagination & what took me weeks to achieve could probably have been done in less than a day by somebody a little more code savvy. Nevertheless I had put in a lot of time & effort into this theme, only to eventually discover that the heading tags that I had applied during writing an article / post, were not actually displaying to the search engines !
Diy Computer Repairs Using BluMag Theme
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In the screen shot above you can clearly see the heading tags highlighted, but unfortunately there is only the H1 title & H4 in the sidebar, all other heading tags are missing!
Diy Computer Repairs Using iNove Theme
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Without making any adjustments to the site apart from changing the theme from BluMag to iNove, we can now clearly see that all title tags are displaying correctly to both human & search engine eyes. This is a major factor with regard to search engines & the ranking of our pages!
Now to any right thinking person, they are going to wonder how can these heading tags display correctly to a human eye, but not display to a search engine..? Well I’ll leave you to form your own opinion on that one! Suffice to say I did contact the guy that built this theme, several times, requesting that he contact me via email so I could send him the screen shots showing the error! I’m still waiting by the way & this only goes to enforce my previous thoughts on this subject.
2. iNove Ok so having installed iNove & rearranged a few things everything in the garden should be rosy..? Well I’m sorry to say that much as I like iNove, yet another problem has reared it’s ugly head & is an error of equal importance to the title tag issue. This time the problem is the use of frames to display the excerpts on the home page. Why is this a problem you may ask..? Well lets look at the home page below;
iNove Theme
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Everything including the Windows 7 article & the other 8 excerpts below it, would not be seen by some search engines, simply because it is in a frame! Add to this the increased work involved in coding extra noframes pages & the problems that can be encountered with links & navigation and this then becomes a very costly theme indeed! Yes it is quite true that frames are not as much of a problem as they used to be, nevertheless I see little point in giving myself more work than is actually necessary. I had wondered for a few weeks why it was that my home page was getting ranked quite easily, yet all other pages seemed to be struggling..? Having researched this further on the Internet, I discovered this is a typical issue of websites using frames!
So What Is The Answer
Well I believe that free themes do still have an important role to play, especially with newcomers to blogging. Many of us have no idea of what design to go for when we start out & it is only by trial & error that we eventually stumble upon a suitable layout for our blogs. There are numerous different layouts for sidebars & headers and it would be ridiculous to have to buy every theme in order to test out how it would fit into our blog layout. Therefore use free themes wisely, but always keep in mind that whilst they may be a design marvel, they can often be a SEO nightmare.
What are your thoughts on this subject..? Have you had bad experiences using free themes..??
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Posted by Steve (Admin)
on Jan 19 2012. Filed under Wordpress Themes.
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