This post was directly inspired by the frustration I used to feel while hunting for themes. Plugins were easier because the wp-plugins.net feed is a lot better.

I do hope though that this post and your comment above inspires people to present the themes and plugins better.

The same applies to Plugin authors. Please, use Pages to feature each Theme or Plugin, or if you have hundreds of Themes, then use a Theme Viewer (I think Alex King has one in a Plugin) or create a Page with a list at the top with jump links to the specific ones listed on the page so if someone wants to write about the Theme on their blog, they have a SINGLE LINK that will take the user directly to the item under discussion. One Page per item is better.

As someone who also writes about these things, this is the NUMBER ONE complaint I have.

Number Two is directed to those who think “I did this for my mother. I hope you like it.” is enough of an explanation about the Theme or Plugin to help us understand what it is and why we should be motivated to use it. I can’t you how many of these I found while doing my month long series on WordPress Plugins.

Folks, don’t wait, and don’t use the excuse that you will do this on your new ones and not the old ones. You can update the links within the Theme Viewer and http://wp-plugins.net databases and even use redirects or a link on the old page to the new Page. Do it now. It can be the make or break difference.

You can post updates in blog posts, but update the Page, too. And put your changelog at the bottom. Tell us first about your Plugin or Theme so we know in the first two sentence what we are looking at.

The harder the potential user has to work to figure out what this is about, the less interest they are going to have in it.

Ajay, you are a star. Thank you for bringing this up.

“Yup, the ones who have good experience, who will take care of every minor thing”

should be

“Yup, the ones who have good experience will take care of every minor thing”

May be I will write one soon so it will help people

Regards,
Deep

@Deep, I’m with you on this one. I make the theme with a whole set of files, as that is how WordPress starts looking.

Do let me know what you guys think about it?

Regards,
Deep

I don’t actually accept theme sponsorship for my themes. Those are questions for the community because the solution comes down to a disclaimer.

If the disclaimer requires the author to say it’s sponsored, say it’s against Google’s guideline, then there’s not much point in uploading the theme for download in the first place because people will assume they shouldn’t download it.

I try to make all my themes with a similar layout and CSS Styles, though they don’t match the default themes.

I’ve run across themes that use CSS tags other than the basic “content”, “entry” and other basic tags for those functions. Or, they group the tags strangely in the style.css file, placing tags for a single element in several parts of the file.

Is it enough to simply inform users of sponsored links? Do they need to know that it’s against Google’s webmaster guideline?

@ttancm, I put the “or”, because I don’t think a screenshot will ever do justice to a theme, unless it is a full size one, in which case, you might as well have the live preview.