The Best Part of Free WordPress Themes…

Dec 07

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There are so many free themes available for WordPress blogs. (Quite frankly, they blow Blogger away.) But you have to be careful. Some of the free templates come with baggage: “free” templates that aren’t really free, built in plug-ins that (unintentionally) hinder, and worse, hidden adsense ads with the developer’s affiliate code (It’s nice that WPThemesfree.com tries to politely steer developers away from these pitfalls.)

We like the i3Theme 1.2 by Mickey Cheong (a WordPress theme designed by N.Design Studio, columnized by MangoOrange.) The stylesheet (style.css) usually contains the copyright and details about the theme. Perhaps the best part of Mickey’s theme is that we can live with their terms:

By downloading and using this theme, you agree to the following terms:
- You may NOT resell this theme
- A link back to N.Design Studio and MangoOrange must be retained in the footer (either modified or unmodified)
- You may use this theme for personal or commercial projects
- You may modify, translate or distribute

We can live with that. We have no desire to make money from the theme. We want to use the theme to make our site attractive, so that our content earns us money. And in return, as we rise to the top of the Google PageRanks (PR), our link back to N.Design Studio and MangoOrange become more and more valuable. A great template allows bloggers to create attractive sites which in turns drives traffic back to the designer (where, presumably they make money through advertisements providers like Google AdSense or Etology.)

Don’t like cookie-cutter templates? No problem. Take the theme and then tweak it to your heart’s content. We modified the original template a little bit. The designers put it some code that allowed visitors to click and drag the widgets (content) in the sidebars to wherever they wanted. That didn’t fly with us. After all, we want our ads to be in a specific spot. So we changed the template code. Sadly, it took us more time than we’d care to admit. In case you like the i3Theme 1.2 and want to disable the moveable boxes, all you need to do is open the header.php file, find the following code:

<!– Sidebar docking boxes (dbx) by Brothercake - http://www.brothercake.com/ –>

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/dbx.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/dbx-key.js”></script>

and change it to the following

<!– Sidebar docking boxes (dbx) by Brothercake - http://www.brothercake.com/ –>

<!–Disable the sidebar docking boxes
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/dbx.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/dbx-key.js”></script>
Disable the sidebar docking boxes–>

Or… maybe just leave the template as it is. There are plenty of free templates out there. I’m sure you can find something you like.