I’ve recently switched over to the Voluptua theme for my WordPress blog. The theme is designed by Ashley Morgan of Upstartblogger and is seriously one of the best minimalist WordPress designs around. I’ve caught some serious blogging fire since finding the theme and am completely overcome by the blogging bug.

I did, however, make a few tweaks to the theme to best suit my needs and will be making more minor cosmetic changes as I go along. Right now, though, my focus is on hammering out some of the thoughts I’ve had for a while now.

I am especially proud that the theme now completely validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The original theme came with a number of errors and warnings but being the design freak I took it upon myself to fix them. I’m not a PHP programmer or anything but with my HTML & CSS background I’ve fixed all of the errors and all’s kosher in validation land.

Check out my amazing badge:

 

There is one thing above all with WordPress that bugs me the most. The free WordPress themes directory. I’ll admit, I have stopped bothering to look at the directory for new themes because there is one word that can mostly describe the themes found in the directory: REFUSE (as in junk, garbage, dross, etc.).

I will congratulate the theme designers that have posted themes to the directory, but I believe that some may just be posting for the link and the traffic to their own sites. Designing a junk theme, posting, and getting links rolling in forever shouldn’t be a given. I suggest that WordPress do a thorough cleaning up of themes in the directory.

The cleaning up can actually be done automatically by setting some higher standards for the free themes in the directory. Here is what I propose:

1) Remove themes if the owner’s site is no longer online.

Nothing bugs more than finding a theme and especially a plugin and then searching for some additional documentation only to find that the designer/developer’s site is no longer online and the person is non-contactable. This should be grounds for immediate removal if the site is offline for more than 2 weeks.

2) Remove themes if they receive less than X number of reviews in a period of 6 months.

Some themes will get some initial light based on the “newness” factor but since it’s junk it will eventually just take up space. Without reviews it means that people probably don’t really care about it.

3) Remove themes if they receive less than X number of DOWNLOADS in a period of 6 months.

I am extremely surprised at the number of download some of the most lame themes get in the directory. However, given the fact that it seems that there is still a lot of downloads even for the most good design-lacking themes, it makes sense that a higher standard be set. 50, 100, 200, whatever, but set a bar so that if a theme does not reach that number it will get removed.

These standards will ensure that theme designers are spitting out good, high quality stuff that people like, and that if your theme is on the borderline and on the verge of being remove, designers will rally their blog/site visitors to log on to the directory and either rate the theme, or download it (or encourage others to download it) so that the theme will remain in the directory.