WordPress Clone Themes – Your Take?

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:

TweetPress

And here’s a screenshot of my Twitter profile.

Theme Lab Twitter

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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What Makes a “SEO-Friendly” WordPress Theme?

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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Tasty Showcase – Free WordPress Theme

Finally, presenting the winner of theme battle #3. Tasty Showcase was a template designed by Brad of DemusDesign, who also coded it in XHTML/CSS/JS. I then took the coded template and ported it to WordPress. It has a ton of widgetized areas, including widgetized footers (plural).

Tasty Showcase screenshot

Download

Read on to see the features, including how to use the slider, in more detail…

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