WordPress
Graphics themes have received an analysis which
appeared in a review,
July 6th, 2006 in WordPress Station. Michael B. (the owner of WordPress
Station) made a post on
his blog about our free WordPress
themes after trying out some of them back in February
of 2006.
When we
started producing WordPress themes on regular basis we
got word to Michael that we would like for him to review
the new designs. So he chose one and did the analysis.
Michael went on record, he essentially found our WordPress
Templates to be limited in its use of CSS and XHTML.
He had some nice things to say about our graphics and
pricing.
In the WordPress Station article Michael goes on to say
that he believes Template Monster will continue to develop
WordPress Templates for the changing needs of the WordPress
community. Yes, Template Monster has many, many choices
for a well designed, good looking WordPress Template, and
they provide a great start for blogs that have a specific
theme in mind.
And now some answering statements from our Production
Team:
One thing I’d suggest is to
incorporate the use of the widgets plugin…
1. There are many different plug-ins for WordPress which
improve the experience for both bloggers and readers alike.
Template Monster does not (and nobody should) guarantee
that all users will want even the most popular of them.
When starting this product line our aim was to provide
a basic product as soon as possible. Which is what we provided.
Now with some experience with WordPress templates sales
and technical support statistics we will add more features
to our themes. We are actively moving to production of
three-column themes (as you may know we already provide
two-column themes) which will give our clients more options
to play with the blocks and structure. The next step will
be widgets. As with any product line we must develop, release
and incorporate changes into our products that have been
tested in both spheres: technical and market demand. This
takes time, but getting it right is not just a matter of
creativity, it is also a matter of supplying what the market
needs. We will accelerate our production in WordPress Templates
because the blogosphere is a fastest evolving field in
Web.
Now, onto the the move from tables to CSS/XHTML.
2. About CSS: The aim here is to make sure these themes
render the same under the major browsers. Using the display
property of div tags in CSS is very good for the Mozilla
family browsers. As for IE we use float property in CSS
instead. Of course there are many different coding methods.
We chose this one for its stability, and because our coder
team is very familiar with this particular method - so
we used what works and tests. The only bad thing about
this method is that you will need to edit HTML along with
CSS to customize the layout. We believe most of our WordPress
customers use the theme as it is, without making changes
to it. But we are currently conducting a special survey
among our WordPress customers to find what changes are
needed, if any.
Not to mention, there’s no h1 tag for the title…
3. As for h1 and h2 tags: In our understanding design
is of greater value than SEO. We assume that those who
do SEO for their blogs know how to add h1 and h2 tags.
Those who don’t do SEO – wouldn’t care
about it at all. You will need to add two more CSS styles
(line-height and font-size) to add these tags. It’s
not a big deal actually, but we are considering adding
them to our new themes.
