I have just started a blog to discuss wellbeing and a personal health story of mine I wish to tell. I am searching for a clean theme which is flexible (many layouts or can customise).
I found theme Brookside, which I like, however, someone has said the coding is terrible.
I read online that code is important for search engine optimisation, is that true? How can you tell?
Also, theme Pixwell seems popular but when viewing the demos it loads incredibly slowly, does that mean my site would also?
Themes wouldn’t be accepted if they were catastrophically written.
Who was it that suggested the code was bad? Did they say what the issue was?
These are stock themes so there will of course be ways in which they could be improved, but the coding is also only part of the considerations around SEO optimisation. Unless you are planning on investing in everything else eg. Consistent and optimised content, SEO plugins, site mapping , search console etc then it wouldn’t be right to just blame the theme.
Can’t inspect the themes from my phone but both are elite authors and one has 5 star rating from over 70 reviews so it seems unlikely that it is that bad.
It is mentioned on the Brookside theme reviews regarding the bad coding. I really like this theme but the comment has put me off
Here is what they have written:
Blockquote
Totally crappy coding. The author claims that it supports WordPress 4.9.x, but it never works on it.
I newly installed WordPress 4.9.14 to start a new blog, and right after it, I installed Brookside. What I got was a fatal error. Nothing was displayed except a lot of error messages.
I sent four e-mail messages to the author asking for support. The author replied to the second message only. In this one and only reply the author provided a fix, but it was no fix. It just made the situation worse. WordPress rejected the author’s coding.
I am sure that this author never tested this theme on the various versions of WordPress that the author claims works with this theme. What kind of jerk sells a WordPress theme without testing it?
I cannot imagine how a theme does not work at all from the start. I believe that this author will continue to neglect to test this theme on various versions of WordPress.
So I decided to ask the author to refund my money, but so far the author has been continuing to ignore my request.
In view of this situation, I strongly recommend against buying anything from ArtstudioWorks. Just stay away from ArtstudioWorks.
So according to the item comments where there has been any issue, the author has stepped into help fix it.
Personally I would disregard that 1 review / it was left 8 days ago and is concerned with installation on WP 4.9!!
FYI 4.9 was 2018/19 and the current version is 5.4 so unless you are planning on using an outdated version (which would be very irresponsible esp as WP 5 was a significant change and update ) then you won’t face that same concern
First, unless you are a developer yourself, you will never distinguish good from bad code.
What should interest you is if the theme works with the latest versions of WP, supports PHP7 and if it is regularly updated. How fast author reply to support questions, etc, etc.
I would totally ignore that specific review. Demanding support for two years old WP version and even claiming that it somehow shows the bad coding quality is absurd. Author of that review has no idea what he is talking about.
You seem to be knowledgeable on all things relating to wordpress, and I was just wondering when you buy a theme does it come with the page title graphic/logo design?
It’s usually this which sells the design for me, but I can’t imagine it would be chanageble to the site name so imagine not?