Well, maybe we don’t have a standard for WordPress themes. Some themes are attractive for this type of bloggers while the others are not. We shouldn’t educate them. They know about their businesses and which style will be good for them. All we can help them is show which theme is good and bad (by codes, structure and other factors).

Very compelling post Alex, you show wisdom beyond your years… keep up the good work.

Chip,

I wish I was as optimistic as you are regarding the paradigm shift. Not in official Theme directory, of course, but outside of it, where there’s no one to regulate things and enforce something similar to Theme Review Guidelines.

There’s a good reason why McDonalds will always beat a place that serves nice food in sales volumes, for same price people seem to prefer lots of junk to regular quantities of good stuff.

The way I see it, there’s two ways to normalize user expectations when it comes to what a Theme is and what it isn’t:

1. A marketplace that sells themes for less money than ThemeForest does, but they would have to be Themes and nothing but. No plugin teritorry code involved.
2. A marketplace that sells themes like I just described, but for a premium price. For that to make sense theme review would have to be flawless and marketplace would have to guarantee each single line of code is great. So, probably something like WordPress.com commercial themes, but for self-hosted websites.

If we as the WordPress community want the quality of themes to increase, we need to tell people what makes a good theme in the first place.

This principle is one of my primary motivators for involvement in the Theme Review Team, and by extension, for speaking at WordCamps: to help educate both developers and end users regarding what truly constitutes Theme quality.

Your “search engines” tick mark is a perfect example: what makes a Theme “good” is not that it is “search engine optimized” or that it integrates every SEO bell and whistle du jour; rather, what makes a Theme “good” is that it is designed with clean, semantic markup, and that it gets out of the way of (or even facilitates) the integration of SEO Plugins that add those bells and whistles.

There is a paradigm shift that needs to take place with respect to what constitutes Theme quality. That paradigm shift is now almost three years in the making with the official Theme directory, and I’m starting to see inroads in the commercial Theme shops, as well. That’s exciting, because in the end, the real winners are the end users.

If we as the WordPress community want the quality of themes to increase, we need to tell people what makes a good theme in the first place.

I’d argue that this is something ThemeForest (generally) already trying to tackle through its’ ratings system. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really help users find what would be considered “good” themes, rather, it helps users find themes other users consider “good”. So in essence, they are perpetuating the problem.