You’ve heard the old adage “you get what you pay for” and probably most people have experienced that truth at some point in their life. There are promises all across the web for FREE this and FREE that and often, there is a catch.

When it comes to Wordpress themes, and probably any blog platform themes that you get FREE from a third party, there is something that you have to watch out for, because if you are not careful you have a lot to lose.

FREE Wordpress themes could end up COSTING YOU. Not just in money either.

Tell the truth, when you come across a blog that you like the design or layout of, especially if you are in the market for a new theme, you scroll to the footer to look at the credits to see where the theme came from.

Admit it.

You do it.

I do it too.

Have you ever come across one of these footers with strange links in them? Like instead of saying who the designer was with a link to their site, it links to an online casino, or some other unrelated site? Or maybe even to a sort-of related site either in addition to or in place of the theme designer’s site?

Something like the example below…

In most cases, your use of the free theme requires you to leave ALL links intact.  See, theme designers create these free themes and that is great for you and I, but they want to make a little bit of money too so they sell text links to companies and require you to leave them in the footer if you use the theme.  And often too, they don’t give you much of a choice…they encrypt the footer and other parts of the theme to make it impossible for you to edit if you don’t know what you are doing.

Why is this a problem?

By using a theme like this, you have essentially provided a lifetime text link (in the example above – 2 links) to a company that you have no relationship and a site you know nothing about – FOR FREE.  Sure you could look at it as payment to the theme designer for the use of the theme, but even a low ranking site can get $100-$150 for a year for publishing a single text link.  So while this “free” theme did not technically cost you anything, you are giving something away in exchange that has a much higher value.  Your real estate and page rank. 

But more importantly, who knows what else is hiding in the encryption that could damage your site. It could be malicious code that infects your site or your visitors computers.

How do you identify an encrypted theme?

Below is the code from my footer on What’s That Smell? so you can see what the code of a typical footer looks like.

<div id="footer">
 <div id="footerleft">
    <p>Hosting by: (use coupon code GREEN for 20% off)</p>
    <a href="http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-2982924-10410811" target="blank"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/hostgator.png"></a>
 </div>

 <div id="footerright">
    <p>&#169; Copyright 2010 <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>.  All rights reserved. </p>
    <p align="right"><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/accidentalmommies/post" target="blank"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/accidentalmommies/post?bg=ffffff&amp;fg=000000&amp;anim=0" height="26" width="88" style="border:0" alt="" /></a></p>
    <p align="right">Theme design by <a href="http://topmomblogger.com">TopMomBlogger.com</a>.
 </div>

</div><!-- end #footer -->
</body></html>

Below is a partial screen shot showing what encrypted code looks like (in your footer or anywhere in the theme).

It’s a mess and you have no idea what is says!

Now you have two options if you want to decode it, one is complicated and one is easy….I’ll tell you about them in my next post so stay tuned.

Oh, and for the record, SkinPress, whose theme that original footer above is from does not appear to encrypt their themes, nor did I find any requirements that the links needed to stay intact.  I could be wrong, but I didn’t come across any in the theme I downloaded.  So while I used one of their themes as a visual example, their code might be perfectly normal and benign.

Always double check any free theme you download for encryption prior to using it on your blog. Who knows what kind of malicious code is inside it!

~ Kim