Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else.
I’ll often be asked about “good places to find free WordPress themes” and the only places I’ve come to recommend are the official WordPress Free Themes Directory and more recently the Free Themes area of ThemeGarden. WordPress is a fantastic piece of software, spammers love taking advantage of fantastic software. WordPress has an entire market of spam-filled assets out there, and it’s a professional responsibility to educate others about it.
Like anything, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Many SEO’d free theme sites are just that, as this article points out. Give it a read as a refresher, and if you run your own WordPress site or are asked for help about free themes, make sure you’re giving good advice.
Comments
Maybe this at least partly explains why so many WP-driven sites I have visited host malicious code directly, or pull it in from remote sites. Fake anti-virus downloads seem to be a favourite. It seems to me that whenever an outwardly-innocuous site triggers my internet security software, it’s running on WP. I always assumed they had been hacked; maybe they were set up with the malicious code already built in.
I suppose these day we have to expect that anything that can be set up on the web by a beginner with no knowledge of what they are doing will be open to exploitation in this way. Unfortunately most of the noobs contemplating setting up a WP blog will never see that article, because (as Don Rumsfeld might say) they don’t know what they don’t know — so they won’t try to find out.
Nonetheless, that article should make those who DO see it think before they leap. I’ve bookmarked it and will certainly point it out to anyone considering building a blog on WP.
I think the part of ‘educating’ people is key here. There are great (at least i think, but I’m no developer) free themes out there — one more to pick through without Google free themes is: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/08/19/100-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes-for-2010/