Woothemes is one of the best Wordpress theme providers and received mostly positive reviews in the community. With about 325 theme providers listed on this site, Woothemes is now ranked on #2 in the Overall Best category. And many of their customers leave good comments about their themes and support on Woothemes’ review page too.

This article will touch on a different aspect of Woothemes. It is the experience I had with their affiliate program.

When it comes to treating the affiliates, it is to my dismay that Woothemes falls short.

On September 10, 2010, I login to my Woothemes’ account to check my affiliate sale. When I clicked on the August report, I found a sale reversal of $10.5.

See the screenshot below.

Immediately, I contacted Woothemes via their contact form and the following is what I wrote to them.

Hi,

I found out something about your affiliate program. I checked my affiliate report and found out that you reversed a sale in August (see the attached screenshot). Since there is no money back policy for your themes, why is it that you reversed the affiliate sale?

Please advise.

Regards,
Brian

Adii, the co-founder of Woothemes, replied within 12 hours with the following:

Brian,

The reversed sale was for a fraudulent transaction i.e. it was reversed by our payment processor.

Kind Regards

Adii

The WooThemes Team

It is perfectly normal to have fraudulent sale on internet but I decided to check my report in more details and found something not right.

I managed to track down that the reversed sale was locked in January 2010 and the commission had already been paid on Jun 02, 2010 (I input my payment info in May 2010 so this is my first commission payment).

It just didn’t make sense to reverse a sale which were paid out months ago! Obviously, I didn’t accept their explanation and wrote back to demand a better one.

Hi Adii,

This is not right. That transaction was locked in Jan 2010 and the commission was paid via Paypal on Jun 02, 2010

Paypal Transaction ID: 49487968K1215093J

So there is no reason that it is a fraudulent sale when you reversed it in August 2010.

Please give a valid explanation.

Thanks.

Regards,
Brian

btw, my account username is “xxxxx” (removed for privacy reason)

Adii replied with an explanation below:

Brian,

Chargebacks by Mastercard / VISA sometimes happen months after the actual purchase. That is the valid explanation; I realize it’s unfortunate, but this is a reality online with fraudulent purchases.

Kind Regards

Adii

Though they have the rights to do so but I don’t think it is good to treat their affiliates this way so I replied with the following:

Adii,

I have been earning affiliate income for many years and I understand about the chargebacks but this is the first time I encounter sale reversal after more than 6 months. I think all the other affiliate programs I joined absorb the loss if chargebacks happened after the commission had been paid out.

So can I come to the conclusion that with Woothemes affiliate program, all the sales I got few months ago were not 100% secure even after the commission has been paid out?

Regards,
Brian

And Adii replied…

Brian,

All sales are 100% secure unless they were fraudulent to start off with. I truly understand your frustration in this regard and unfortunately this is a byproduct of other companies’ policies (i.e. VISA / Mastercard).

Kind Regards

Adii

So I come to a conclusion that Woothemes will pass the chargeback to the affiliates no matter when the sale was made. I then replied to him.

Adii,

You have a point. But from the affiliates perspective, ALL the sales that we made in the past (no matter how long it was) may be reversed if they were fraudulent.

Thanks for the clarification. I think what I am experiencing is worth sharing with other affiliates.

Regards,
Brian

Are you one of Woothemes affiliates? If you are, we are eager to hear your experience.

What’s your thought on this? Kindly leave your comments below.

The Pristilo theme has been designed in mainly two colors: black and white. It comes with a fixed width and 2 columns and is widget ready. The Pristilo theme also supports a host of other features like AdSense, Gravatar, Twitter, jQuery Integration, Options page and Rounded Corner. Other features are place for banner ads, sliding featured post and a featured video section.

The Pristilo theme is one of the more attractive themes. The interface is easy to use. It is also easy to install and little programming knowledge is necessary to install and use it. Tinkering with the Pristilo theme is not advisable, as users have reported a few errors after they tried to tinker with it. The Pristilo theme has enough space for advertisements so sponsors do get their due.

At Themegrade.com, themes are tested on the basis of their search engine optimization and a general test. These tests are designed to weight the benefits and the drawbacks of any particular theme.

Pristilo scores a total of 12 points out of a possible 19 in the general test that gets it a percentage score of 68%. The Pristilo theme is W3C CSS compliant. It is compatible with popular internet browsers, the IE7, Chrome and Firefox. The Pristilo theme comes with support by the designer. It supports important post area functions like Floating Content, Auto Adjustment and Nested or Threaded Comments. It does not support sidebar auto adjustment or sidebar link hierarchy. The Pristilo theme scores very good marks in the Special Features category. It supports a Twitter Feed, a Drop down Menu and is magazine style. The designer gets high marks because of the high level of coding skill involved.

The SEO test gives Pristilo a good score of 72%, as it gets 5 points out of a possible 7. The Pristilo theme is search engine friendly because of its W3C CSS compliance. It supports Home Page Heading and Post and Page Title Tag SEO. It also supports Content Code Position. All of this makes it easier for the various Search Engines to rank the Pristilo theme.

The overall average theme score the Pristilo theme obtains is a very good 68%. This overall theme percentage score also obtains a Themegrade.com bronze medal for the Pristilo theme.

On the basis of the general test and the Search Engine Optimization test, the Tutorialicious theme is a good theme. The best feature about Tutorialicious theme is the fact that it is based on the FeedBurner management application. FeedBurner is a custom provider of RSS feeds. FeedBurner also provides management tools to various web based publishers. Other commendable features that come with the Tutorialicious theme are the featured image section, content section, administration panel and the advertisement management option. The Tutorialicious theme is based on 2 columns, it is colored a nice looking blue, and comes with fixed width. It also has a right sidebar and is widget ready. The theme captures the eye at first glance.

The Tutorialicious theme is compatible with IE7, Firefox and Chrome browsers. It supports all the important Post area functions like Proper Image Alignment, Floating Content, Auto Adjustment of content and Nested/Threaded Comments. The Tutorialicious theme supports a magazine style, a grid style and a photo gallery. Sadly, support from the designer is not included. Also, the major drawback of this theme is that it is not W3C compliant at all. Search Engines are bound to have a harder time with ranking a page using this theme. Despite this major flaw, the Tutorialicious theme still manages to score a decent 64%, amassing 12 points out of the possible 19.

In the SEO test, the Tutorialicious theme scores 4 out of a possible 7, which is 58%. It supports Home Page Heading SEO, Post and Page Title Tag and Content Code Position. As explained earlier, the lack of W3C is the major flaw as it does not support CSS or XHTML languages.
The Tutorialicious theme scores 64% in the general test category and a 58% in the SEO test category. This makes for an average score of 62%. 62% qualifies the Tutorialicious theme for a bronze medal ranking.
The Tutorialicious theme is a good theme with nice customization options. The simple style and looks go in its favor.

Memory Book Theme Review

Setting It Up

The Setting up of the Memory Book theme is quite simple enough and is done in quite the same way as any other Wordpress Theme. All that one has to do is download the memory-book.zip file and extract it to the /memory-book/ folder. Next, the folder has to be simply uploaded to the /wp-content/themes directory of an ftp client (say like Filezilla). All that remains to be done now is to activate the theme through the WordPress admin panel under the Appearance or Presentation Tab.

Features

The Memory Book is a free theme which can be used for personal blogs. The visuals of the Memory Book theme are simple enough. It just consists of four basic colors, namely white, orange, brown and gray. The background image is nothing very spectacular, let us face it; we have seen themes which have some awesome backgrounds. Moving on, the theme basically consist of two columns, the column on the right is a sidebar containing the RSS feed subscription link, the search bar, the Categories Section, the Archives section and the Recent Posts Section. The theme has links to its Pages incorporated in the header section of the theme. The topmost post in any page is a sticky post. The posts in the pages have the usual classifications, like there are posts with an image in them, posts where an excerpt is shown and also posts which have links and 3 pages within it.

There are a few major drawbacks of this theme though. The components of the theme are not quite well arranged. The quality of the code used by the designer in the design process of this theme is not quite up to the mark. A few very obvious discrepancies that can be seen are the RSS feed link creeping over the tab of a page. The date of the sticky post is overlapping on the current page name. All these defects have a negative effect on the person following the blog. There is no Help and Support section provided by the Designer for the users of this theme, so if they face any problems, they will have to work it out on their own. The Post Area is improperly aligned, with the area for images also being improperly aligned. The Memory Book theme also does not support nesting of comments, thus making it difficult for the blogger to keep track of who is replying to whom in the comments. There is also no feature for auto adjustment of the Side Bar. It might seem like a trivial issue, but it does complicate matters once an image or quite a lot of text is to be put in a section. In that case, the side bar may overlap with the text or image area, thus causing huge problems for the followers of the blog.

Classic Theme Review

Setting It Up

The Setting up of the Classic theme is quite simple enough and is done in quite the same way as any other Wordpress Theme. All that one has to do is download the oldcar.zip file from wordpress.com and extract it to the /oldcar/ folder. Next, the folder has to be simply uploaded to the /wp-content/themes directory of an ftp client (say like Filezilla). All that remains to be done now is to activate the theme through the WordPress admin panel under the Appearance or Presentation Tab.

Features

The Classic is a free theme by WordPress which any motor enthusiast would love to use to set up his or her own blog on Cars. Let us consider the general look of the theme. The background is nothing spectacular, so it does not manage to hold the interest of the reader for quite a long time. Apart from all this, it consists of three columns. The right column acts as a sidebar which is divided into parts for the Archives Section, Categories Section, Links sections and the Meta Section. It comes ready with the support of widgets like reddit, twitter and digg it. It also comes ready with a section for ads, whose space is reserved on the sidebar on the right. The left column has the contents section, which displays the posts. The third column is located at the bottom of the theme, and houses the Recent Articles Section, Most Viewed Section and the Most Commented Articles Section. The topmost section of the theme has tabs which provide quick access to the Categories listed under the Categories Section. The section below that shows posts in the format of a picture along with the name of the post. This section can further be divided into further subsections say for example, The Most Popular and Featured Posts.

With the help of the built in plugins like the digg it and reddit plugin, one can directly submit the post one is reading to reddit or can ‘digg it’ with the help of the reddit and digg it buttons beside the name of the post.

It might seem like a good theme at first, but it does have some flaws which need to be taken into account. Prominent out of these is the lack of a Help and Support Section from the side of the designer, so if the user of this theme runs into any problems, they will have to work it out on their own. The Classic theme also does not support side bar auto adjustment, which may seem like a small issue at first, but becomes a huge headache when the sidebar starts overlapping with the contents of the posts. Another disadvantage is that it does not support link hierarchy in the sidebar that is if there are pages with links that are three levels deep, then they are not displayed properly.

After considering all the points, as well as the fact that it is a free theme, this is one theme that any car enthusiast would simply love to use while setting up their Blog.

Mimbo theme Review

Mimbo is a theme available for download on the website themegrade.com. For a blogger, a well designed page is very important as it can determine the blogger’s page rank. A good theme ensures that the page is attractive. A well designed theme also makes it more convenient for the blogger as well as the reader. The Mimbo theme is part of the Wordpress application, which is used for managing the content of the page. It is mainly used in the blogging circles. Mimbo has been amongst the most downloaded and most popular Wordpress themes since it was introduced in the year 2008.

Mimbo has been designed by Darren Hoyt. The Mimbo theme was released first as a 2.0 version, but has been upgraded to the 3.0 version. The Mimbo theme requires a Wordpress version of at least 2.3, but users of earlier editions will encounter problems while installing the Mimbo theme.

The Mimbo theme has gone through extensive testing at themegrade.com. It has been tested on the Wordpress version of 2.8.6. The Mimbo theme has been tested on the basis of its SEO (Search Engine Compatibility) and a standard general test. The Mimbo theme has scored well in both the areas. It scores a 69% in the general test and a 72% in the SEO test with an overall score of 71%. This means it qualifies for a bronze medal rating.

The general test takes into account many qualifiers. One of the most important aspects of this test is the browser compatibility test. Mimbo passes with flying colors here. Mimbo is compatible with the top browsers operating today like the IE7 and Firefox. The Mimbo scores well with most of the standard content a theme incorporates like nested and threaded comments and image alignment. A drawback for the Mimbo theme is that it is not CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) compliant, but works well within XHTML (a hypertext language). Another major drawback is that there is no support from the designer. But as this is a completely free theme, this detail can well be ignored.

One of the most major drawbacks of the Mimbo theme is that it is not newbie friendly. People without a Wordpress or HTML language background will have a hard time with the theme. This is mainly because before installation the user has to tinker around with the codes and files. But the Mimbo theme can work great with a little help from someone well versed in these matters. Customization on Mimbo will be of no hassle to beginners and pros alike.

On the looks front, Mimbo is very well designed. It is easy to use, well spaced out and is perfect for magazines or newspapers. Blog pages will look good with the Mimbo. The layout is grid based, and consists of minimum images. Mimbo is also widget ready as of now, which is a great advantage in its favor.

Mimbo is a very good free wordpress application. It receives top marks in almost all the areas a good theme is known by. Mimbo is a great choice for bloggers and readers will be attracted to the great design and layout provided by Mimbo.

Tech Mice theme Review

Setting It Up

The Setting up of the Tech Mice theme is done in quite the same way as any other Wordpress Theme. All you have to do is download the techmice.zip file and extract it to the /techmice/folder. Next, simply upload the folder to the /wp-content/themes directory of your ftp client. All that now remains to be done is to activate the theme through your Wordpress admin panel.

Features

The Tech Mice Theme does have a few good features of its own. First and foremost being that it is compatible with almost all of the more common browsers namely Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome , Safari, IE versions 6 to 8 and also with Opera. The homepage can be quite easily customized and has the usual spaces for the Comments Section, Blogroll, Links to the Most Recent Posts & older Archives and a separate section for ads. But the most notable feature which should be pointed out is that it has a section on the homepage, where 3 featured posts can be displayed.

It comes with support for widgets, global avatars (Gravatars) and RSS feeds, thus increasing the customizability of this theme. It also has a built-in plugin which automatically shows thumbnails (which have to be manually set) for posts, like the previous posts. It also has the ability to display excerpts of posts in case thumbnails do not need to be displayed.

Cons

The only major setback that one might run into while hosting this theme is that the links of the “Older Section”, “Add a Comment” and the Search Bar are not properly visible. Their dark purple hue on the black background of the theme makes them quite hard to find as the two color tend to merge together. Apart from these minor setbacks, there shouldn’t be much of a problem using this theme as it is supported by the latest version of WordPress, not to mention the older versions as well.

Watercolor Theme review

Setting It Up

The Setting up of the Watercolour theme is done in quite the same way as any other Wordpress Theme. All you have to do is download the watercolor.zip file and extract it to the /watercolour/ folder. Next, simply upload the folder to the /wp-content/themes directory of an ftp client (like Filezilla). All that remains to be done now is to activate the theme through your Wordpress admin panel under the Appearance or Presentation Tab.

Features

This theme is easily one of the most visually pleasing themes available on the Internet for WordPress. The default background image is extremely catchy, and anyone viewing it will surely become a fan. The color combination of the background is also pleasing to the eye. The colors are not so bright that they hurt the eyes. In fact they are just perfect. The contents section itself is also quite well designed graphically. Using the image of a page from a diary gives the blogger a feel of actually putting in entries, like when one is writing in a journal or a diary. The sidebar holding the categories section, pages section, archives section, blogroll section and tag cloud is also quite properly integrated into the diary page look. The theme comes ready with an RSS feed generator, which is located on the top right of the theme, on the left of the Search bar. The RSS link generator is designed as a carving on the wood on which the search bar is located. Bookmarks are used as page indicators, and one can move from one page to another either through the page section on the right or by clicking on the appropriate page number on the bookmark. In order to enjoy the full visual pleasure of this theme, it is suggested that one view it at a resolution of 1280 pixels by 1024 pixels.

Apart from its looks, the other useful features of this theme are that it has a Free Support Forum. It is also cross browser compatible and functions on Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 7 as well as Internet Explorer 8. It has a Flickr gallery enabled by default and it also comes with the support for Global Avatars which are more popularly known as gravatars. Apart from the RSS feed plugin, it also comes with a Flickr RSS plugin, which can display up to a maximum of not more than 5 pictures in the footer of the theme. If in case this plugin is not installed, then it will not give any error, instead, one will only see a blank photograph frame in its place.

The default font used to write the title and description is the Arial Font. One can change it though, but it requires a bit of knowledge on php as well as html. The best part about the theme is that it can easily be customized, and the background can be changed to any other picture. But as the default background is itself so good, one need not change the background at all.

SevenFive Theme review

Setting It Up

The Setting up of the SevenFive theme is quite simple enough and is done in quite the same way as any other Wordpress Theme. All you have to do is download the sevenfive.zip file and extract it to the /sevenfive/ folder. Next, simply upload the folder to the /wp-content/themes directory of an ftp client (like Filezilla). All that remains to be done now is to activate the theme through your Wordpress admin panel under the Appearance or Presentation Tab.

Features

The visuals of the Seven Five theme are quite bare. The theme just consists of a white background, and the homepage has vertically arranged sections for the Latest Post, Latest Tweets, Latest Pictures, and Latest Links and last but not the least the Contents Section, which basically consists of posts with an excerpt of that post being visible. The font used for the theme is the Lucida Sans font, which in spite of its simplicity, adds a certain charm to the theme. It has links to the Blog, Twitter, Photos and Links in the form of Tabs on the upper right corner of the homepage.

There is a particular reason as to why this theme is so bare. The creators of this theme wanted to make the theme as minimalistic as possible. The theme is classified as a “Lifestream”, which means that it is a time-ordered stream of entries and documents that works like a diary of our electronic life. So every entry or document that the blogger uploads and every document that his followers send is stored in the lifestream, that is the blog. This blog can thus also be considered as a social activity stream.

The SevenFive theme does not support any external plugins, but it does come with built in plugins for Twitter and Flickr. It does have a few important plugins like the RSS feed generator missing, which the theme creator plans on releasing in the updates for the theme, that are to come.

The Seven Five theme is compatible with the versions 2.8 and 2.9 of WordPress, if it is installed properly. The best thing about the Seven Five theme is that it is extremely simple to use. Anyone who knows how to handle WordPress will have no problems in using the Seven Five theme as well. But just in case someone does need a bit of help, they can find it at Press75.com’s Support Forums, or they can directly access the SevenFive theme’s Installation instruction by following the given link:

http://www.press75.com/v4/documentation-support/seven-five-setup-usage/

A few more important details that have to be considered are the requirements to use the SevenFive theme. It requires version 2.8 or above of WordPress to be available on your ftp server. Other requirements include version 5 or above of MySQL and version 5 or above of PHP with GD Support enabled on your hosting environment. If someone is not sure whether their web hosting environment is compatible with the Seven Five theme, then they can download a free plugin to check if their hosting environment can handle it, the link to which is available on the Documentation and Support Page.

TurnOut Mag Theme Review

Setting It Up

The Setting up of the Turn Out Mag theme is done in quite the same way as any other Wordpress Theme. All you have to do is download the turnout.zip file and extract it to the /turnout/ folder. Next, simply upload the folder to the /wp-content/themes directory of an ftp client (like Filezilla). All that remains to be done now is to activate the theme through your Wordpress admin panel under the Appearance or Presentation Tab.

Features

The Turn Out Mag Theme is a premium WordPress magazine theme, and it does have quite a few good features which need to be taken into account. One of which being, that it automatically resizes the images that are uploaded on the blog using this theme. This feature is a huge time saver as it saves the up-loader the time and trouble of resizing the pictures manually using a photo editing software like Photoshop. The theme comes ready with the support for advertisements and banners. It is quite well optimized for Search Engines as well, which means that users using this theme for their site will have a good number of hits from Search Engines like Google. It also supports gravatars on comments as well as the threading of comments which is nothing but the attaching of related comments together, so that the theme user can easily keep track of which reader is saying what and to whom he/she is replying to.

A few of the more noteworthy features is that it has a Featured Video section apart from the general sections for Comments, Contents, Archives, Blogroll and Popular Articles Sections. It also supports RSS feeds from Flickr. Another nice feature of this theme is that it has an Animated Tag Cloud. This is nothing but a normal tag cloud, but, with a catch. The catch being that it rotates the tags in 3D depending on which tag is being pointed to by the cursor, thus making the theme look much more visually pleasing and exciting to use. Another noteworthy feature is that it supports paid help and customization from the WordPress Team.

Regarding the looks and feel of the theme, all I can say is that it looks neat, clean and simple and also has a professional feel to it. The color combination is soothing and does not hurt the eyes. The Animated Tag Cloud gives the theme a sense of sophistication in spite of its simple colors and looks.