What Don't You Like About WordPress Themes

[vangogh]

You know I'm working on WordPress themes and a WordPress framework. Thanks to all who have helped with your thoughts. I've asked what you want to see in a theme, but I'd like to flip the question here.

What don't you like about WordPress themes in general?
What makes them hard to work with?
What do you wish they did better?

Feel free to offer complaints about the themes you've been working with.

Thanks.

[rezzy]

Ive hinted at this before. I really dont like having to mod some many pages.I know this allows greater flexibility, but for me when I first started my original blog layout I missed some of the pages and it resulted in a quite broken layout.

Ive since learned more about how Wordpress works, but the learning curve was steep.

[vangogh]

So you prefer to have a minimum amount of custom pages in the theme by default? That's actually one of the things I've been wondering about. How many custom pages to create. If a theme stuck to the same files that are included with the default theme would that work for you?

[KristineS]

I think the theme should be easy to customize. As we discovered with the OBS theme, putting banners and such in images makes it much tougher to change colors or pictures. I think everyone wants to have a blog that has it's own unique look. Making it easy to customize a theme would make that theme much more appealing, at least to me.

[vangogh]

Kristine, easy how? Are you saying easy to change by editing theme files or easy to change via an admin panel that offers customization options? Do you have a preference?

[KristineS]

For people like me, who know just enough about HTML to be dangerous, an admin panel might be a good idea. I can edit files if the edits are simple, but anything complicated will probably have me calling you. An admin panel that allowed me make changes would be nice because I would think that a lot of the mechanisms to make the changes would be built in. I wouldn't have to figure out how to make the change, just what changes I wanted to make.

[vangogh]

What kind of things in general do you think you'd want to change?

[KristineS]

Let's see, colors, images, maybe how things are laid out. Maybe be able to move the various sections around, put the categories underneath the archives etc. Change font size and the font on the posts.

It's possible a lot of this stuff can already be done and I just don't know how to do it. I'll admit, I'm pretty much a lightweight when it comes to dealing with HTML.

[vangogh]

Some of those changes can be done through widgets. Assuming the theme has a widget are in the sidebar say you can add things like archives and categories and move them around within the widget area.

Other things like colors and the general layout can be controlled to a degree through an admin panel.

All the things you're wanting to change are things I've considered. The trick becomes making a theme flexible enough for the possible changes different people might want to make without making it too complex.

[Harold Mansfield]

It is a given now, that no matter what theme I buy, there will be some hacking going on. I really hate opening up theme files and finding out that the coder has just dumped it in without any organization. That sucks. Nothing is more frustrating than paying for a theme and the CSS file is just one big long paragraph of code.

Changing colors is a big deal, and should be an option in the admin panel (I assume we are talking about a $65-$100 theme)

I have just figured out that I like things such as video and banners, other places besides the sidebar. It doesn't have to be coded in as long as I find my way around the index.php, I can do it myself.

One of the things that I am starting to notice a lot are footers. I am really starting to like dynamic footers that maybe hold the "About" information, an RSS feed to display maybe 5 or so headlines, and an area to list your My Space, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking addresses. I hate using up sidebar space for those things. (maybe just a 3 column footer widget set up)

Last night I tried my hand at putting some icons in my page navigation menu next to my RSS icon for those things. It didn't come out too well, but if someone could do that, that would be awesome.

Just anyplace else except the sidebar (header, footer, sub menu...what ever)..I think from here on out it should be standard that designers start making room for those different addresses