Voidy claims to be a WordPress theme for authors. This writer’s WordPress 3.0 theme has a home page that claims that there is good content and that there is great content. Voidy, it seems, is only useful for those who write great content. Or, at least, that is what the poor developer of another WordPress theme for writers thinks after spending too much time listening to the echo chamber inside the blogosphere.
The idea upon which many new free WordPress themes for writers are based is that writers, that is good writers, and presumably, professional writers, either don’t want or don’t need anything fancy “distracting readers” from their amazing writing. Therefore, top writers want WordPress theme features that don’t have extra things to worry about like being AdSense ready themes, or SEO optimized themes, or heaven forbid, attractive themes with graphics and nice typography. No, you see, writers just want their wonderful text to sit alone, black on a sea of white open space, so that their readers can bask in the glory of powerful writing and beautiful prose.
I don’t know where this grade-school fantasy of what a real writer is like came from. I first encountered the whole “writers want simple, plain, uncomplicated WordPress themes to showcase their writing” nonsense from the Erudite WordPress theme. (Incidentally, real writers would not use the word “erudite” in this manner, even if its meaning could be shoehorned into titling the design concept. If nothing else, it is conjugated improperly. Anyway…)
Ever since then, every time I find a new WordPress theme for writers, it has this same banal design motif at its core.
Writers WordPress Themes Should Make Money Easy from Great Content
It will likely take a person who is both a quality writer and a quality web developer to create the first truly great WordPress theme for writers. When it happens, you can be sure that it won’t be a plain theme that “showcases” the writer’s writings.
What a professional writer really wants from a WordPress theme is for the theme to handle all of those other things that have to happen in order for the mythology of Content Is King to come true. As writers, we don’t worry about our content being overshadowed. We right great content. If that is what you want, then you’ll read our stuff regardless of what flash-based graphics are moving around the text. What we DO actually worry about is that our quality articles and well-researched posts will be buried in the wasteland at Page 8 of Google search engine results pages, while thin, barely passable junk posts make thousands of dollars a month for their authors because the person that wrote those articles knew to nofollow his Header 1 links to the .htaccess file next to the noindex parameter of WordPress widgets and their canonical links.
You get the point.
What REAL writers WordPress theme does is make sure that when we write high-quality posts they get all the right tags and links and nofollows and whatever else they need so that Google can find them, index them, rank them highly, and allow the writer to benefit from not only having produced “great content” but also having had that content indexed properly and ranked #1 by Google for all of the relevant keywords, all without us having to hack up our writing to satisfy Google’s engineers. In other words, a professional writer wants a WordPress theme for writers that makes money with writing quality.
Somehow this turned into a rant about bad WordPress themes for writers out there. I’m not going to let it go to waste or rewrite it. Properly using and re-using content written is how to earn money writing online easily and quickly. Instead, you can come back tomorrow or the next day (depending upon how it gets scheduled) and read the rest of the Voidy WordPress Theme for Writers review.
(Hey, look at that, a precious link to the review article that will count as a vote that the webpage that opens when you click it is the King of Content even though neither your nor the spider that follows the link have any idea of whether or not the words on that page are anything but gibberish. — Whew! I guess I’m testy today 🙂