I found one of my themes, Red Light has got a very detail review by Taragana Blog (or otherwise known as Simple Thoughts). At first glance, this site seems to be very big with over 170k monthly visitors base on the Compete data.
The blog has a wide range of posts that include IT-related news release, software, blogging and of course, Wordpress related resources. It seems that there are a group of people behind sourcing for the useful resources because you’ll see new posts with unique views being published almost everyday (sometimes 3-4 posts/day).
Back to my Red Light theme. I am amazed at the way Taragana reviewed the theme. From the layout, header, two sidebars to the date icon, color matching and SEO, the team has done such a comprehensive review.
I was feeling a bit discouraged when the developers thought that the theme sucks at the first look. But the designers were quite impressed.
Excerpt from Blog.taragana.com
The first look inside our team sums it up pretty well, our developers jumped up and said, its too bright and flowery (effectively saying that it sucks), our designers were quite impressed. The bottom line – You need to have a bit of an artistic sense to really understand and value the theme as it is. Let’s analyze its design.
That was the first impression of the developers and the designers. When they get down to the full review, the Red Light theme received well. There is only one part of the theme that needs improvement: the SEO.
The review said that the title is using the standard format (not SEOed) as follows:
Post name << Blog name
A title that is optimized for search engines would need to allow the users to define the title manually instead of using a standard code. This can be done easily by installing a SEO plugin. I have my 2 reasons not to do that:
- I don’t want to install any plugins to my themes to avoid compatibility issues in the future. Imagine when Wordpress upgrades the version and make certain plugins not compatible with the new version. The worst thing is the plugin developer doesn’t upgrade the plugins. If that happens, you have to decide whether you want to upgrade to the new Wordpress version and remove the plugin or continue with the old Wordpress version to enjoy the usage of the plugin.
- I gave assurance to my theme users that all my themes are compatible with the latest Wordpress version. When Wordpress had a major upgrade (eg. from v.2.6 to v.2.7), I have to recode ALL my themes to make them work on the latest version. Imagine fixing 40 themes(by end of the year this site would have more than 40 good quality themes!) one by one manually. That’s a lot of work! Excluding plugins in my themes is to save me time fixing the plugins issues so I can focus on the more important theme issue.
Nonetheless, the other part of the themes are actually optimized for SEO. The text for the post title, page title, sidebar title are defined using H1 to H4. Also, the code is clean and passed the W3C compliance (both XHTML and CSS). Not many themes pass this difficult test.
I would like to thank Taragana blog for doing such a good job in pointing out the goods and bads of my theme. I’ll constantly improve my skills to give my theme users the best they will get.
My next theme, Wooden Fence (as shown under the “Upcoming New Theme” in the sidebar) is supposed to be released by end of April. However, while working on the Seagull theme, I discovered something about the comment section that I have been doing improperly. 
