Update: This contest is now over and the winners have been announced.

For any of you who have been following the WPShout or followed either @AlexDenning or @epicalex (no relation) on Twitter, you’ve most likely heard of a new premium WordPress theme company launching soon called WPShift.

They launched a couple days ago with a theme called ShiftNews, normally priced at $59.95 for a single site license. Check out the screenshot below or click through for a live demo.

For two lucky Theme Lab readers, you could win a single site license to the ShiftNews theme absolutely free.

Watch the following video to get an idea of what this theme is all about, including features (like custom widget based layout control) and support.

Read on to find out how to enter the contest. It’s not that hard, I promise.

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I came across a theme the other day called TweetPress, which bears a very obvious resemblance to the Twitter profile design. Let’s compare.

First, here’s a screenshot of the TweetPress theme:

And here’s a screenshot of my Twitter profile.

Not only is it a striking resemblance, it appears the cloudy background image was lifted directly from Twitter’s website, among other things. It’s the default background image set for new profiles.

Update: According to Gabriel Jones, creator of the TweetPress theme, “The [Twitter] API returns the background image, the link colors, everything…” in this comment.

Cloned WordPress themes aren’t exactly a new phenomena though…

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There’s a lot of hullabaloo regarding “SEO” when it comes to WordPress themes. In this series of posts, I’ll go over what most people believe is “good SEO” when it comes to web templates. If your theme doesn’t have it already, I’ll show you how to “correct” it.

• Content ordering, and how to make sure your content appears before the sidebar no matter the layout
• Clean, semantic markup, and how to eliminate unnecessary code from your themes
• Lots and lots of navigation, including the all-important breadcrumb navigation.
• The “All In One SEO” syndrome, how to integrate a custom write panel to control title and meta tags in your theme

I’ll update this post with links to the articles as I publish them. Think of the above as a dynamic outline of my “SEO friendly” WordPress theme series.

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