On the 28th I wrote about the new service Site Report from our friends at AboutUs.org and today I’m going to prove to you why you need it even if you have a professionally made blog theme or a free theme from the directory at WordPress.
For the test I’ve used one of the Xavier Media test blogs I use to develop plugins, themes etc before it’s released into the public. The test blog had Youtube and Yahoo Video videos in the post, pictures and some posts where just plain text. I also had a few book reviews from Amazon as a few of the posts. The content for all tests where the same and all the pages checked where the same, just the blog theme changed.
Test 1 – Tweetsheep
The first theme I checked using the AboutUs.org Site Report where the theme Tweetsheep from WebDesignLessons.com that I found the other week. As you can see on the results below I got the same errors on all pages (except one which wasn’t tested at all due to some server connection problems). Two of the errors are serious (red) and the other one if yellow, but should still be corrected.
Test 2 – Live Wire
The second theme I tested was Live Wire from WooThemes. They’ve created several popular themes over the years, so they should get really good test results (or at least you would hope so). The results where unfortunately a disappointment since the theme had several red errors (not on all pages) and also two types of yellow errors:
Test 3 – Twenty Ten
Since the two themes I tested first didn’t give the test results I had hoped for, I checked the default WordPress theme and unfortunately that’s also a disappointment to me because a simple theme like that shouln’t have any errors at all. The theme got the best test results, but far from perfect.
Test 4 – Delicate
This theme where the most popular at WordPress.org when I downloaded it and I have to say that I really like the simplicity of the theme. This theme got as many red errors as Tweetsheep in test 1, but only half of the yellow errors so it performed a little bit better than Tweetsheep in total.
Since many of the errors where the same for all themes they could have been caused by the content itself (so I’m not blaming everything on the themes), but the errors where different between the tests so it indicates that there’s still a difference between the themes.
So the lesson we can learn from all of this is that even if you use the most popular theme from WordPress.org, the standard theme included in the blog software you use or even if you get a theme from professionals you need to check that the theme is working with search engines. AboutUs.org got a very easy solution to to these tests for you (read my blog post here) and all of these tests where done using the AboutUs.org tool in less than 30 minutes (including coffee refills 😉 ). You can read more about Site Report or buy it directly from the AboutUs.org web site.
