A contemporary view and comment on WordPress themes
There is currently a new trend going on the internet among people that want to make money.
People (I am not going to defame them publicly here) are selling links on the WordPress themes’ footers for money and are so impudent to release their themes under special Terms of Use (such as the usually very fair Creative Commons license). Under those licenses it is (at least it is claimed) forbidden to remove the sponsored link.
But is it really?
Wordpress users such as Garry Conn and Lisa Sabin-Wilson strongly argument against using sponsored themes, or leaving the themes intact as the author (not even necessarily the designer!) demands it.
Why are sponsored links on themes so interesting for certain people?
Obviously because of the money. It is clearly not a matter of interest, because why would someone put to a Credit Card site or Thai vacations and cheap hotels in his footer or sidebar. Out of interest? Defiantly not!
Money, as always, plays an important role. Scammer companies, or those companies who have not really taken the time to read Google’s TOS (and would thus know that what they do is contrary to what they want to achieve) believe that many links on different people’s sites make them money. Indirectly of course, because they assume that more links from more sites leads to a higher pagerank, and thus to a better position on searches for specific terms (such as credit cards, thai vacation etc).
Garry describes it like that:
They don’t know that the theme they just downloaded has a link into a bad neighborhood and they don’t know that Google is penalizing their site for having the link on their site…
What options does ordinary joe new-user have?
Lisa offers these:
- Remove the sponsored link from the footer
- Contact the sponsored link owner
- Quote him/her a price for a text ad link on your domain
- Tell him/her you’ll replace it if he’s willing to pay your ad rate
- If he says no, use said theme minus the sponsored link
My view on this:
If the design is really good, and by good I mean like really lovely and time-intense, more than just a day of development, then one should contact the theme sponsor and ask him for a solution or leave their link and change the size to something like arial 8px or use the tag around the link plus add a rel=”nofollow”.
If the theme looks like it has been stolen or adopted from another page or has something in the footer such as “design by: (name) , hosting by: (name), random shit: (name)”, remove everything but the designer’s link, because after all it is his work. Everyone who has done some wordpress theming knows that porting a design (a finished design) over to wordpress templates is not that much work. After the some tries you get it done real quick. My point is that removing the footer is not the best way, but adopting the footer is. You can also add the designer’s website to your sidebar, if it looks better, I think that shouldn’t be the problem as long as you keep some sort of information that you were not the one who came up with the design (because that is just rude).
I truly share Lisa’s view on that, saying:
Is removing the links (sponsored, ads) illegal?
[...]
If released under GPL? then no.
Under a different licensing – - like a CC Share-a-like, for instance – - attribution to the original creator of the work is required. I have NO problems providing a link to the creator of the work (read: the actual person who put in the blood, sweat, and tears to create the graphics, style and code of the template.)
The link to the Credit Card Finance site? Unless the Credit Card Finance Site is the “Original Author” (meaning the individual or entity who created the Work.) – then I am not obligated to keep the link there.
Actually, why am I writing this?
Some weeks ago I got approached by some guy, who (as it later on turned out) was pro-actively selling ad links/sponsored links on wordpress themes, porting old or free css themes over and marketing them.
It was Hans (zeebob.com) who recently approached me and asked me to upload his (scammed themes) to the wp theme viewer, offering $10 for each theme. But honestly, selling my soul for a mere $10 sounded so crappy to me that I turned him down and giving him some tips concerning the lame layout of his page (with like all ads on there). Also, all this sponsoring is really giving me the creeps, one link to the original author seems fair, maybe also link the person who the work or some elements are based on (icons by famfamfam e.g.), but 4-5 links is just the taking the piss.
I hope that people become aware of the sponsored links in the footers and that designers can once again share their themes without getting approached weekly by marketeers as described above. This comment is discontinued, if I find some time I will write a follow-up or answer any comments.
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