For most of you who land here from search engines, this is a rant. Don’t want it, go back.

I face a problem. I need a brilliant WordPress design. There are no brilliant WordPress designs.

There, I said it.

In the context of WordPress, when i use the word design, I really mean theme. That is because I come not from the WP world, but from the world of print magazines, newspapers, MS FrontPage and CMSes.

I agree there are conveniences to using WP that are just not available in any other mainstream alternatives. The huge amount of plugins. Or the sheer number of themes. But that does not mean it is the pinnacle – Wordpress is definitely far from it.

Why so?

Let us tackle WordPress itself first, and then we will come to premium themes, custom themes and Wordpress designers later.

To begin with, Wordpress once installed, there is the initial irritating tweaking to do. You know, permalinks, Akismet, WP stats, this and that. Now, almost every WP expert agrees that permalinks need to be friendly, readable urls, with or without category name. In fact, many advise that you should get rid of category name altogether, and just have a post url. I myself find this convenient while using magazine themes with posts that belong to multiple categories. But a simple, ‘use only postname’ option does not exist in WP. Why not? Its just another radio button, bloody hell add it there, thank you.

Then, comments. Why do I have to activate Akismet? Why is it not activated by default? Is it because of the crappy connection to a wordpress.com key? Using one thing to make sure people join up for another?

Same goes for WP stats.

Pageviews are more important than unique visitors since when? Pageviews are just one important metric, visitors and unique visitors are probably even more important. If you don’t know what unique visitors are, check out some free counter sites for a few insights. Who makes these decisions?

Now on to premium themes.

I have checked out a few premium themes which are the most famous in the market. The user manuals are definitely written by people who should not be writing user manuals. They are written badly, confusing, and most of the time, outdated.

Support forums? Premium theme makers seem to be real small operations, and their support forums are barely alive. The theme designer or someone else occasionally make an appearance, and often help out a bit – the feeling I get is that these people are really busy, and there just is not enough in it for them to offer great support. Not their money’s worth, frankly

Suggestion: I know your premium themes are hard work. I know the money I pay you is not enough to justify great support. But please make it clear to us. When I see there is a user manual, I expect it to be a proper usable one. Not outdated. If it is, please say so. Tell me that for the money I am paying you, you can’t offer me more and I understand.

No, this is too difficult. Unless all premium theme designers together decide to be honest about it, no one can really afford to tell us the truth – that for most buyers, its pretty much the purchase and that’s about it. If an individual wordpress theme designer tells us so, he would just come across as offering a bad service.

The worst culprits are magazine themes. To all of you magazine theme designers, your themes are still bloggy. One goes for magazine or news themes, I guess, for a particular newsy look. But no one seems to succeed here. Some come closer to the magazine look than others – but the blocks and boxes you place everywhere give it away. They look like desperate attempts to be professional and authoritative. You have not broken free from the bloggy look – long, long way to go, dear designers.

Custom Wordpress designs and designers

One, get rid of the black backgrounds and the white text in your themes, please. That is so 1990. That is so porn-website. Please avoid if you can. It is tiring on the eye, if one has to read more than a paragraph of text in a black background / white text theme.

I see charges of $ 800 and upwards for a custom theme design. When I look at the portfolios, I see blogs for which mostly only a few elements are changed. Different header image, different RSS icon, right aligh this, left align that, change fonts a bit…. obviously these custom wordpress designs are based on some basic template and the work really is over pretty soon, I think.

This is not to say I have not seen custom themes which are definitely worth the money you pay.