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Back in Feburary, I stumbled upon some free templates from Template monster. I made some comments here on this blog about how ironic I found it that they were table based. The irony was that one of the tables based designs were based on Cameron Moll’s design. The same Cameron Moll who expounds on the virtues of CSS and XHTML. I summed up with a snide comment, “get with the program”. Little did I know, that they came across my comment, and have indeed attempted to step up to the plate and make their WP designs CSS and XHTML based. Before I get into the details and observations about that aspect of things, a little more about the themes, and how I came about them.

I was contacted by their marketing department to gauge my interest in reviewing the new designs. I was given the opportunity to browse their catalog, and choose one, which then I would be given a key to download and use. I’ve done so, and since then it appears several other nice looking themes have been added. All the themes range right around $50 for the off the shelf price. If you want the unique design for yourself, that is, no one else can download it after you, the price jumps to around $720. The $50 price, isn’t bad, considering you get the photoshop files that were used to produce the theme, which all are very graphics based. I’m assuming you can alter those files for your own, which means you can tweak the $50 design to not look exactly like an another. The caveat being you can not redistribute the theme or files.

For the most part, all the themes are the standard two column design, with either a left or right hand sidebar. So far nothing jumps out as being in the vein of the newer, no sidebar, big footer designs. One thing I’d suggest to Template Monster is to incorporate the use of the widgets plugin if you are going to produce those type of designs. The big thing all bloggers want is the ability to customize their blog, add content to the sidebar, etc. All the designs I looked at, including the the one I downloaded, simply have a list of categories, archives, and links. The widgets system would give the most basic user the ability to easily customize their blog, and would be a good selling point in my opinion. Would also help cut down on support help, I’m sure.

Now, onto the the move from tables to CSS/XHTML. On the surface, it does appear they have created valid XHTML designs. But upon closer inspection, the style sheet rings of tables still, with the main wrapper a class called .table, with a resulting class .table_row. In addition, all the wrapper divs are classes, despite being unique divs (which, from my understanding of CSS, should make them #ids, not .classes). Not to mention, from my inspection, all the containing divs do a display:table, which, does validate, but for an end user trying to customize their theme, will be confusing, IMO, and smacks of a short cut. I have coded enough WP themes myself without the use of display:table to think it’s not a necessary part of the design.
Another missing element of the designs is the use of style for heading tags. For instance all headings are using inline style fonts sizes, as well as the strong tag, vs setting h2 tags around post titles and sidebar headings. Not to mention, there’s no h1 tag for the title, which, again, in my understanding, is a bad thing when it comes to search engines. Ultimately, the end user is being forced into using the style as is, or editing the template pages, versus the style sheet where it’s meant to be. It also is limiting in the content, as one persons blog is not another’s. In general, I think much more effort could be made to separate the style from the templates, and give the end user a little more control over fine tuning how their content is displayed, especially the posts themselves. I short study of either the default or classic theme that comes packaged with all WordPress downloads would easily expose the many options WP offers in post output and style.
Let me be clear, I’m not a CSS expert, I have honestly only been using it on a regular basis for about a year and half, and have not learned the intricacies of proper semantic mark-up and separation of style. But I have spent a generous amount of time studying the argument, and believe I have a firm grasp of where the WordPress community generally is taking such design. Not to mention, I’ve seen time and time again in the support forums request for help for such issues with other, similar type themes. So in summation, I believe the Template Monster team will continue to develop their WordPress designs to fit the needs of the community, and in the mean time, if you are looking for a basic, well done, graphic oriented theme, and haven’t found one of the multitude of free themes to fit your eye, they are a very good choice. Particularly if you are starting a blog with a theme in mind, they have quite a few designs meant specifically for DJs, bands, and other niche topics

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