So, you go to Google and type in a search for “WordPress themes.” You skip past the official WordPress theme directory because out of the 1,000+ themes hosted there, you couldn’t find one you liked.

So you move on to another site that has a great collection of free themes, you download one you like and install it on your site. It has 50 random irrelevant spam links in the footer, and you can’t edit them out because there’s weird encrypted code in footer.php, but who cares? It looks good so that’s all that matters. And chances are your visitors won’t ever scroll down that far anyway.

Using a theme with encrypted code would be a big mistake, and unfortunately most users using them don’t even know or care that the themes they’re using can open their entire blog or even server up to malicious attacks.

Unless you want to end up like Bart, I suggest you read on to find out:

• What types of sites to avoid when downloading themes
• How to spot encrypted code in a theme without manually checking
• How to decrypt code (if you really want to use a theme)
• A list of trusted sites to download themes from with confidence

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It’s the season of giving, and that’s exactly what we’re doing in this post. Below are four free PSD templates designed by Anto who was generous enough to release these absolutely free and allowed me to post them here. These were just quick designs, for blogs and websites, but figured they might come in handy for something.

Purple Soho

There are more. See the rest and download them below. Click the images to see larger previews.

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May 14th, 2008. That was the day of Theme Lab’s last redesign and over one and a half years later, I thought it was time for a change. Just for posterity, here’s a screenshot of the old design.

In this post I’ll go over a few of the changes in the new design, there’s also a video.

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