Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
IV
If you plan to build a business around your WordPress site, unless that business is designing web-
sites, you might not want the responsibility for building and maintaining your site. You'll almost
always buy a theme when your motto is “focus on the business; leave the rest to the professionals.”
Searching for a Premium Developer Among Free Themes
Remember that the designer of your new premium theme could well be linked to at the bottom of
your current site with the free theme. Most, if perhaps not quite all, premium theme developers
started as free theme developers. It's an apprenticeship of sorts; as they learned the craft doing
free themes, their skills and popularity grew, presumably to the
point where the designers began to think they could possibly
make a living making WordPress themes. Whether they have
what it takes depends, at least in part, on the market. If you like
the skills and creativity a person brings to your favorite free
theme, you can encourage that developer/designer by dropping
some cash in the tip jar at the theme's website. Alternatively, if
you're in the market for a new look, perhaps that favorite
designer has some premium themes for you to look at.
For much the same reason, even if you don't want a free theme,
and want to start with a premium theme, a search in the Free
Themes Directory could be fruitful. Each theme's thumbnail lists
the author in the Details link. Although there's not a direct link to
the author's website, you can use a people search at
WordPress.org to find the designer's community member page. If that designer has any smarts, you
should then be able to link directly from the member page. Conversely, if you can't find their place
of business somewhere on WordPress.org, perhaps they don't do business at all.
tip
Maybe it's a little crass, but con-
sider using an ad-friendly free
theme to generate income from
your blog to pay for a premium
theme down the road. Searching
the Free Themes Directory for
“adsense” generates several
themes that simplify integrating
Google AdSense into your
WordPress self-hosted blog.
Finding Premium Developers Using the Commercial
Theme Directory
Until very recently, you had to search the Web, or click an advertisement on a WordPress-oriented
website to encounter premium WordPress themes. This is changing, with the advent of the
Commercial Themes Directory at WordPress.org (see Figure 12.4). Installation from this directory
isn't integrated into the Administration area, but it's nice to have a single place to begin the search
for the right theme to buy and the right designer to buy from.
To get a spot on this page, theme designers must use the
GNU General Public License (GPL) and offer professional sup-
port options. The most-interesting requirement of all, though,
is that the designer must write a haiku that serves as the
caption for each developer's link. Some developers appear to
be happy that their marketing slogans fit the pattern, some
use humor, while still others perhaps aim to show they can
be creative with words in hopes that you'll think they are just
as creative with themes.
note
Haiku, in case you aren't familiar, is
a Japanese three-line poem form,
where the first and last lines have
five syllables each and the middle
line has seven syllables.
