I think there are some really cool themes out there for WordPress, including the one I am using right now. And, so far, it’s fair to say that some of the best ones come at a cost. But this, comes with a health warning.

Take the one I am using right now. You’re either looking at a silver-green one or an eerie black one depending on whether I’ve got my act together or not. Both of them I have paid for in some form or another. The black one is the Revolution Pro theme. I would link to the page where you can buy it but the guy who made it barely acknowledges its existence, leaving only a tawdry forum to give you details on its use. Shame, considering a copy of Apple’s kickass OSX Snow Leopard is cheaper to buy than the theme and comes with full support. My friend Colin Boyd knows more about this theme than the author as far as I can establish. Given that the theme relies on a number of contrived plugins as well as a specific routine for posting and manipulating the homepage content, you can’t just get stuck in from the WordPress console and I’d rather get on with the blogging than fiddling with PHP and CSS. I have people for that, after all.

And then there’s the other one, called the MoneyMaker theme. I will bless them with a link as, strictly speaking, the thing was free. However, if you want to do something elegant with it, they offer Photoshop PSD files as a paid for thing to allow you to dress the thing up and make it nice. After all, if it’s live you’ll note an irritating dollar logo I want shot of. At least make it a pound sign or something a little less shallow. Either way, I paid for the PSDs and they’ve never turned up and nobody’s answering my calls.

So, the moral of the story is blog theme creators, in my opinion, shouldn’t be considered to be the panacea of software creators. You want to know how to work the thing you’ve paid for. You want get the things you paid for in the first place.

Heck, you could be less lazy than me, find a really good free theme and then, if it works out for you, donate to the author. You’ll get something you know works for you and that you value and I bet you’ll feel all charitable and good about yourself when you cough up some beans to the guy who made it for free.