ThemeGrade

Test items being uploaded to the sidebar
3 comments are uploaded. In chronological order, Louis is the first to post the comment. Wendy is the second and the site dmin is the third. The comment from the site admin is a reply comment for Louis.

Criteria of passing the test
Louis’ comment is located at the top. The site admin’s comment is listed in the second while Wendy’s comment is in the last position.

If a theme has a nested/threaded comment function, you need to enable it in the WP admin.

Setting  => Discussions => Other comment settings

Tick “Enable threaded (nested) comments 0 levels deep”

After you have configured the setting and the nested comments does not display, it shows that the theme doesn’t have this function.

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We know what it takes to rank on major search engines using only the white hat SEO.

If you want fast and temporary results, you are referring to the black hat SEO and this service is not for you! We only deliver long-term SEO result at a very affordable price!

First of all, we strongly believe that you need to know the basic of SEO before engaging any SEO services. Why? Because it is easy to get lured into paying for services that don’t deliver as promised or you are paying TOO MUCH for the service.

Let’s get down to the basic.

Broadly speaking, there are only two things to consider if you want to rank for a particular keyword: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is how well your page is optimized for search engines while off-page SEO is the links (or backlinks) you get from other sites. We call this process SEO link building.

For an SEO expert, it normally takes less than half a day to research the keywords and probably another half a day to implement the keywords to a page. If you already have your own keywords to target, you can save up to half the money.

For non-competitive keywords in which few people are targeting, you can get them on the first page of search engines by optimizing your page WITHOUT any link building. On the other hand, if the keywords are competitive, you need to optimize your page both on-page and off-page.

One way to know whether the keywords you are going to target are competitive or not is to use the Google keyword tool. Enter your keyword in the box and you’ll get the number of searches in the previous month and the monthly average. In general, keywords with less searches are less competitive and easier to rank but keep in mind that there are some exceptions and you can’t depend on this tool alone.

Avoid SEO companies which
1) promise link back from 1000 (some even 10,000) websites within a short period of time

2) charge you for search engine submission

3) promise to get your site on the first page of search engines within 1 month.

Test items being uploaded to the sidebar
Pages links with 3 levels deep is being uploaded to the sidebar.

Criteria of passing the test
The link hierarchy should display properly.

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Test items being uploaded to the sidebar
4 images with 200x200px in size. In the html editor, the first image is aligned to the left. The second image is aligned to the right. The third image is aligned to the center and the last image doesn’t have any alignment.

Criteria of passing the test
The first image and caption should be positioned on the left while the text is on the right. The second image and caption should be positioned on the right while the text is on the left. The third image and caption should be positioned in the center while the text is at the bottom. The last image and caption should be positioned on the left while the text could position on the right or at the bottom.

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Test items being uploaded to the sidebar
A floating image with 200×250 px in size

Criteria of passing the test
The image should stay within the post area.

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Test item being uploaded to the sidebar
An oversized image with 900x200px in size

Criteria of passing the test
The oversized image should stay within the post area.

In the following example, with proper coding, the oversized image will be resized (or some part of the image will be hidden behind the post area).

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Test items being uploaded to the sidebar
1) An image with 200x250px in size
2) A textfield form with a long embedded field of 40 characters
3) A string of text with 50 characters without spacing

Criteria of passing the test
All the oversized items (image, textfield form, text string) should stay within the sidebar.

In the case of the textfield form in a good design, the textfield form will stay inside the sidebar no matter how long the embedded field content is. See below for detail:

In the following example, with proper coding, the oversized image will be resized (or some part of the image will be hidden behind the sidebar).

In the case of the text string in a good design, the long text string will be hidden behind the sidebar. See below for detail:

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We tested the themes on 3 major browsers, IE7, Firefox and Chrome because they account for more than 70% of all browsers used by the internet users.

Base on the browser monthly statistic report in Aug 2009, IE7 and Chrome has the market share of about 17% and 6% respectively. Given the fact that Chrome’s market share has been in the uptrend, both IE7 and Chrome browsers are given 1 point each.

Firefox has the biggest share of 47% so theme compatibility with this browser will get 2 points.

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If a theme designer provide support for his theme, this item will get a “tick” icon.

To decide if the designer offer theme support, the designer website should have an interactive support page of the theme in the form of comment, forum etc.

We have no control over what types of support to be offered. For example, some designers only offer support for general issues such as theme installation. Some don’t offer theme customization. You have to check with the respective designers to find it out.

Themes with support will get 2 points.

For themes designed by Templatelite.com, you can get the following support:
Top Priority – Functionality Issues
If you encounter functionality issues (eg. theme installation problem), we’ll look into that as first priority. You can post the problem in the comment section of the theme page.

Less Priority
For other issues, we’ll make your comments live and will address them whenever we have time. The solution is not guaranteed. I also hope that other users can help solve your issues while waiting for my reply.

As for plugin issues, we’ll only look into them if the plugins are widely used in the community.

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Most designers ignore the W3C test when coding their themes simply because it is a test too tough to pass.

Nevertheless, to comply a theme with W3C is important because of the following benefits:

• Compliance helps the search engine rankings as compare with non-compliant websites. Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE Web Design explained it well when he said, “Proper use of standards and bleeding edge best practices makes sure that not only is the copy marked up in a semantic fashion which search engines can interpret and weigh without confusion, it also skews the content-to-code ratio in the direction where it needs to be while forcing all of the information in the page to be made accessible, thus favoring the content. We’ve seen several occasions where the rebuilding of a site with standards, semantics and our proprietary white hat techniques improves the performance of pages site-wide in the SERPs.”
• Compliance helps ensure that your website is accessible from a number of devices; from different browsers to the growing number of surfers using PDAs and cellular phones.
• Compliance will also help ensure that regardless of the browser, resolution, device, etc. that your website will look and function in the same or at least a very similar fashion.

Exclusion of CSS Validation

We no longer grade themes on whether or not they have valid CSS for a couple reasons. First, certain “hacks” required to make various features function properly in legacy browsers (i.e. Internet Explorer 6-8) are not valid CSS, but are widely considered to be acceptible means of achieving cross-browser styling. Second, with the latest advancements in CSS3 and the way in which various browser vendors impelent these new specs, including one line of browser-specific CSS3 code can lead to validation errors. CSS validation is more or less a good way of spotting errors in a document rather than trying to achieve a “perfect score,” which is very important in terms of markup validation. Hopefully this helps to explain why we no longer apply a grade in this category.

back to the test criteria page

Each and every one of the WordPress theme listed on ThemeGrade has gone through comprehensive tests. The tests cover general coding issues as well as the SEO.

In this post, we outline the tests being used, the weight of each test as well as the calculation details.

General Test

The general tests of a theme give you an idea of how well the designer coded the theme. When pass, the score will be added to the General Test. The tests with the higher score are more difficult to pass than the tests with the lower score.

If a theme passes all general tests, the theme will score 100%.

In all cases, a theme will be tested against the first 6 general tests.

For most of the times, a theme will be tested against the first 11 general tests.

Calculation method of the General Test.

• Step 1 – Find out how many items a theme has been tested on.
• Step 2 – Add the total score of the tested items
• Step 3 – Add the total score of the passed items
• Step 4 – Take the score of the tested items and divide it by the score of the passed items. Multiply that number with 100 to get the percentage score of the theme.

SEO Test

WordPress does a very good job in internal linking so that makes it easy for search engines to index the pages. To rank for the pages, generally, two main factors are considered: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

The off-page optimization is relating to external links and it has nothing to do with the theme itself. To see if a theme is optimized for search engines, we need to review the theme coding (on-page optimization).

The SEO tests of a theme give you an idea of how well a theme had been optimized for search engines.

When pass, the score will be added to the SEO Test. The tests with the higher score are more difficult to pass than the tests with the lower score.

Calculation method of the SEO Test is the same as the General Test.

Calculation of the total score of a theme

General Test Score x 0.6 + SEO Test Score x 0.4