Mega Champ

I have all my respect for those great guys and gals who do so much hardwork and release those amazing,beautiful wordpress themes for free to the world. And that is why you will see so many wordpress themes directory sites popping up each day, who also do the hard work for you by collecting all free themes in one place. So, last week i was looking for a decent theme for a new website of mine, when i came across one on a pretty popular theme directory site. So, i downloaded it and was fooling with the theme settings.

People with some php knowledge must have seen nowadays that wordpress theme creators are now encrypting their footers, so that people are not able to remove them easily(And i really despise + hate those who download the free theme and still don’t have the courtesy of keeping creator link alive). But there was a problem, i had to modify the theme footer to add some text but it was encrypted. I do have a decent knowledge of php, so i found out a way to decrypt the footer but then came the shocking surprise. In the footer, there was a link included to a site and it was invisible, i mean you won’t be able to see link on the screen but once you do the view source, you would find it to be there.

I was enraged seriously, i thought of going to the theme owner website and give him a piece of my mind, but i did wanted to try this one thing. I went to theme owner website and downloaded the theme again. Checked the same footer code in this one also and now I found out, the theme from the owners website was not having that spammy link.

So, the picture was all clear, it was the work of that wordpress theme directory owner, who was including his own links in other people themes. And mind you this directory comes on the first page of google for the keyword ” wordpress themes” . So, they must be getting 100’s of links on daily basis by using this scam.

So, from next time please download the theme from original theme creator or owners website, just to be on safer side.

Ok so you started a wordpress blog and now looking for a cool,amazing looking wordpress theme to make your blog stand apart. But you are low on cash, so you start looking for free wordpress themes.

And Everyone agrees that there are lots and lots of amazing looking wordpress themes out there up for grabs and their designers have been kind enough to provide them free to download. Also you must have came across those posts in the major design blogs where they list tens and hundreds of “cool looking free wordpress themes”. Infact that is also appreciable as those guys are doing the work for you.

I am pretty sure that you must be drawn to those ultra cool looking themes with lots and lots of graphics on them. But stop, you must think twice before using them for your blog. Those themes are high on graphics and mostly difficult to edit in order to suit to your needs. The original elements in those themes are so tightly aligned that, if you remove them or try to modify them, it will affect the whole theme design and might not look good in the end.

So, according to me unless you are deisgner or atleast with some decent knowledge on css,html,php try to stay away from high-on graphics themes. Rather choose a minimalist design which are easier to handle and edit. You will amazed to see how people are modifying those simple wordpress themes to look mind blowing just because they were easier to modify and play around with.

This is from my personal experience as i have been guilty of getting attracted towards those cool looking themes and then spent day and nights to get them work for me in a way I wanted. But in the end I always ended messing up the design.

Imagination theme is one of the best free wordpress themes i ever came across. Its gorgeous and highly customizable. It comes with 9 different color themes which you can change from the wordpress dashboard itself without having to do any kind of coding or file editing. Just a simple click and you are good to go .

Here are the official features of the theme :

• Plug & Play – No Programming Knowledge Required
• Comes with 9 preloaded Color Schemes
• Customize the Interface to make it unique
• Built-In Twitter, Flickr and Entrecard Widgets
• Built-In Feedburner RSS Integration
• Widgets Ready & Plugins Compatible
• W3C Valid & Cross-Browser Compatible
• Fully Documented Admin Options
• Compatible with Wordpress MU (Multi-User)
• Standalone processing without interfering with default WordPress tables
• All this and lot more, Absolutely Free!

Following are the 9 designs, all packed into one wordpress theme :