Comments on: Free WordPress Themes – With a Catch

By: Ryan Ward@Sandy Springs Real Estate

Ryan Ward@Sandy Springs Real Estate — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 12:32:59 +0000

Free WP themes have come a long way. A lot of them actually do offer some great features and design. However, I think that if you want to really kick your site up a level you might need to switch to a premium theme.

By: Glinda Harrison

Glinda Harrison — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 03:31:21 +0000

Kristi, this is a great article, but it is also a really scary one for users of free themes. Many people use free themes because they do not have the skills to create or customize on their own. These are also the same people who might not be aware of the dangers that malicious coding could represent. A great cautionary tale!
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By: David Bingham

David Bingham — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:28:07 +0000

I’ve written a few articles about Thesis customization
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By: Career Outlook

Career Outlook — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 02:44:06 +0000

It is very useful post for me as I have been searching for the ways to remove that encrypted code in my wordpress theme. I have also read that these kind of codes also harm the search engine rankings.

Thanks a ton for sharing this information
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By: Brian @ TechAirlines

Brian @ TechAirlines — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 05:23:53 +0000

When I first started with WordPress last year, my first free theme had suspicious looking links in the footer. Even with no experience whatsoever, I was quite certain that those links were more like ads than theme credits. When I went into the footer.php file to try to delete it, I was completely puzzled when I was faced with a jumble of random characters.

I have no problem giving credit to the theme designers as they deserve it for their hard work, but if they throw in sponsored links, I delete the theme and look for another one.

It’s a good lesson for everyone about free themes. Some designers can get sneaky.

Brian
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By: D.J.Rony

D.J.Rony — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:36:14 +0000

I know free is not always good and there is always a catch. But I love to help my readers with the free things. I am using free theme for my blog. I hope to buy a paid one soon. I can change the css if I want to. But I don’t like to play with the free themes anymore. You can get plenty of paid themes in warez sites. The thing I did is- only make smaller the footer links and make it invisible by matching its color with the background. 1px link with matching color -How could you see that? It’s easy for the newbies. Don’t think as they can’t do nothing @Jaq . Please show some respect. Free is not always bad. Someday you were newbie too. Thanks to all the comments here.
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By: darren@freebies search engine

darren@freebies search engine — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:49:56 +0000

I have only ever used the themes that come with the basic WordPress installation. They don’t appear to have any underhand tactics to promote things you don’t want to promote. Your description of what you did to overcome the problem is very comprehensive, but it might be better to steer clear of some of these sites with themes. I have used one for my freebies search engine which will quickly find what you are looking for (and some other stuff that you didn’t realise you were looking for!).
.-= New from darren Super deal =-.

By: Jaq @ Net Age Web Design

Jaq @ Net Age Web Design — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 12:16:40 +0000

Heheheheheh! I like it! Most people go for free themes because they’re newbs and don’t know too much about coding, which is the luxury a theme offers. They’ll never be able to muster the technical expertise to tweak things like this themselves, and ultimately the links will remain or they’ll try something else. This is a sneaky linkbulding technique. and is only fair that someone with greater technical acumen can delete the offending code that was misrepresented in the first instance.

By: Benjamin Huebner

Benjamin Huebner — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:52:18 +0000

I don´mind if there is a link in a free theme related to the theme topic. But in this case I totally agree with you.

This seems as someone is selling your advertising space, isn´t it?
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By: Sire

Sire — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 21:54:10 +0000

I came across something similar to this awhile back, and I didn’t feel guilty at all about removing the links. Having said that I decided later that the theme was no longer for me, as why should I send credit to the creator, I left that link in, when he had tried something so sneaky. He should have left it on the demo site so that people knew what they were getting.
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