ThemeGrade.com – One of a kind WordPress Theme Review Site

Today, I would like to announce the launch of a wordpress theme directory site that is so different from other theme directories that you have seen!

Here, I proudly present ThemeGrade.com that I have been working on for months!

In my journey of designing WordPress themes for more than a year, I have downloaded more than 200 WordPress themes to gain insight of how other designers code the themes in order to improve my own skill. During this period, I have found themes using clean coding standard as well as those which are badly designed.

It is quite impossible to tell if a theme has clean coding just by looking at the theme itself. You might get some clues from the source code but few people understand the meaning behind the coding.

This is when I think, hey, why don’t I create a system to review the WordPress themes?

My next task was to find the WordPress theme directories in the industry and see what others do. Not to my surprise, I have found tons of the theme directories from the Google search. Of all the sites, 95% are listing free WordPress themes while the rest are listing premium WordPress themes or the combination of the two.

I visited the sites and most of them are quite disappointing. It seems that the site owners published free themes that are also available in other directories without putting any effort to review them. There is only one site (ThemesPreview.com) which provides some review for a theme. I have written about this site and it’s scoring method few months ago.

I found the tests used by Themespreview useful and have included some of them in the tests on ThemeGrade. However, there is something about Themespreview’s tests that are missing. Nothing has been told about how well a theme was optimized for search engines. It has a test about W3C compliance but there are more things that could be tested in a theme to see if the theme is well-optimized for SEO purpose.

I decided to build a site similar to Themespreview with added tests and features. It is easy to understand how ThemeGrade.com works. Let me explain the layout a bit and some of the key features below:

1. Top Slider
This is the section listing the premium WordPress themes from top designers. If you like the theme, you can click on the shopping cart icon to purchase them.

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2. Featured WordPress Themes
This section features high standard FREE WordPress themes from top designers.

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3. WordPress Theme Showcase
All the themes, free or premium are listed in the lower part of the site.

1. User-friendly Theme Search
The themes are grouped into many categories that it would be easy to find the themes of your choice. Are you looking for a 3-column magazine style themes that are free? Simply select “3 columns”, “Magazine Style”, “Free” and click on the search button and the themes will be shown in the result page!

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2. Theme General Test
Each and every one of the WordPress theme listed on ThemeGrade has undergone comprehensive tests. The general tests of a theme give you an idea of how well the designer coded the theme. When pass, the score will be added to the General test. Taking the passed score and divide it with the total tested score and you’ll get the general test score of the theme.

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3. Theme SEO Test
The SEO tests of a theme give you an idea of how well a theme had been optimized for search engines. When pass, the score will be added to the SEO test. Taking the passed score and divide it with the total tested score and you’ll get the SEO test score of the theme.

After you get the general and the SEO test score, the total score of a theme can be calculated. To do that, first, take the general test score and multiply by 0.6 and the SEO test score multiply by 0.4. Sum up the two number and you’ll get the total score of a theme.

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4. Different Ranking Status for Themes
What makes ThemeGrade so special is the ranking system. Quality themes will be awarded either a Gold, Silver or Bronze status. The themes with the highest standard are those which score more than 90% and are awarded with the GOLD status!

Ever since I outlined the details of each test, I have found out a few things that I could improve for my themes especially the SEO part. Therefore, some of my themes are not getting high marks. I want to make ALL my themes score GOLD in ThemeGrade so it’ll be in my to-do list to revise my themes and make them GOLD!

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5. Two New Themes will be reviewed Daily
Selecting good quality themes and reviewing them in such details take a lot of time. Thus, I have hired a responsible lady who has worked for me before and understands my high standard. She will be the editor of ThemeGrade.com and the person in charge of the theme review.

I strongly recommend you to subscribe to ThemeGrade and get new reviewed themes deliver to your feed!

What do you think of ThemeGrade.com? If you have any suggestions of comments about this site, feel free to leave a comment below.