I downloaded a few user generated free WordPress themes and as usual most of them didn’t render correctly. I considered paying for one but couldn’t find a theme I liked, but I did bump into some software called Artisteer which will generate WordPress themes.

I installed a demo version of that and played around with it a bit and noticed that some of the suggested templates looked suspiciously like some of the free themes I’d seen and tried. That wasn’t a good start, a WordPress theme generated by commercial software which I had tried and found it not to work. Anyway I created a new theme and loaded that up to the server and tried it and what a mess it looked. The posts were displayed in one of the side bars and the main body was empty. No doubt if I fiddle around enough with Artisteer I can get it to work but if I’m going to do that then I might as well just use Dreamweaver and get a better looking page that will work.

On the cover of a magazine there was a CD with three free professional themes from both StudioPress and ThemeGalaxy. So I tried them with my test site. All six when demo’d from the CD looked great. When I tried them with my chock-full test web site they also looked a mess. Jeez, I’m starting to think it’s me or my test site rather than these themes. I removed all of the widgets to see if they were the culprits but most of them still rendered badly. I’m probably just doing too much and these themes are to be used from the initial start of a web site, when there is nothing to import, and not by using them to try and jam a couple of years of cack-handed web site nonsense.

I also downloaded the Web Developer plug-in for Firefox and that’s yet another learning curve. On the WordPress.com pages they mention a Custom CSS Upgrade app that they sell. That looked quite interesting but I couldn’t find a link to actually pay for the darn thing. WordPress obviously don’t do useability testing.

Just had a look at my Akismet stats and I usually get around 500 spams a month for this blog but in April I got 26,000. What the heck happened.