9.Apr.2007 at 8:06 pm | hso
The Other Point of View – A Designers Opinion on Sponsored Themes
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I took the backseat for much of this debate that has been raging for a few weeks now, but it’s time for my response. At Headsetoptions, we are two designers with over 70 themes to our humble credit, some original, some modified and most ported from free CSS templates designed by our friends, and most of our themes created with the aid of sponsors. Why am I saying this, and why now? Well, today, there was a huge cry about “Sponsored Themes” on a popular download site and hoards of users and designers decided to jump on the “kill the designers” bandwagon to vent their frustration, all in response to a mostly one-sided story. As if it is not enough that we make free themes, some users demand, “that we do it without even a single penny coming our way for the many hours we spend creating.”
So here’s my rebut-
- To the users who find sponsor links offensive: I would like to see y’all work for free. No matter what jobs you hold, just work for free, and deliver what ever you do at par with the industry standard, provide support if there is an issue, spend time answering users questions and get paid nothing, all for free, everyday, for the rest of your life. If you are able to do it, so will I. If not, make your own WordPress themes, with your own time and money and stop whining.
- To the designers who are all “holier than thou”: Some of the designers I noticed that complain are the very people responsible for the Theme Viewer to pull the rating system out for good, these designers abused the system to their advantage by creating aliases and rating their work 5 stars with great comments, while rating everyone else (including ours) 1 or 2 stars and of course, with bad comments. If that was not enough, they have misrepresented themselves numerous times in shady activities warranting the system to be revisited and changed. So what credibility do such designers have to criticize others? So why are they all up in arms? Simple, they do not have sponsors courting them, they claim they do, but…
- To the Theme distribution sites: As they pointed out themselves, Sponsored Themes are here to stay, if all the new themes have sponsor links, will people stop using them? Also, by sidelining designs with such attribution, what will you have to offer to the users? Also, pointing out to users that links to other sites cause Page Rank to drop is outrageous, we are not talking about hundreds of unrelated outgoing links, we are talking about links to the authors and couple sponsors at most, which is quite common, so relax.
Here are a few questions we want the readers of this article to answer; this might help clear the myth surrounding sponsored links.
- How can one have the theme author(s) links in their footer if all unrelated links are bad? Not all sites using a theme will engage in anything remotely close to what the theme designer does, hence the author link almost always is unrelated to any site, although the site was designed by the author. Does that make sense?
- Are link for authors site different from say a web-hosting company that sponsors the theme? If not, does that mean authors should not include any links at all in the themes they create? Including their own?
- Is Google Adsense bad then? It has a lot of links to unrelated sites in my opinion. Is advertising of any type bad for Page Rank?
Let’s stop kidding ourselves, it’s blatant BS packaged to create paranoia, people must be running out of gossips to write about.
Here’s an alternative solution for those who want the themes with no links, dole out $10 a pop/theme and have the links removed, this might compensate for the author’s efforts. Why isn’t anyone talking about that? I see no users volunteering to such a simple idea.
We all know what Open Source is and what the various licenses are, if one needs to learn, they can go to Wikipedia. In short, we don’t need a bunch of angry folks trying to sell their own interpretation of it to us. Our users are educated and most bloggers can and do have both writing and reading skills, let’s not underestimate our users, they are not merely cyber-simpletons who will keep a sponsored link on their sites if a theme has it. Anyone who writes a blog knows where the delete button is.
1. this horse is glue « wordpress™ wank | April 10, 2007 #
[...] some designers appear touchingly ignorant of the WP ethos that you MUST work for free or be labelled moneygrabbing scum [...]