Hostgator have started adding “Wordpress Web Hosting” anchor text links to their customers websites, without asking their permission.

If you use Fantastico to do a 1 click install of Wordpress from a Hostgator account, you will get this in your footer:

Seems like Hostgator have decided to give themselves a nice anchor text rich link, pointing back to  http://www.hostgator.com/wordpress-hosting.shtml?utm_source=fantastico&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=wordpress

At no point in the process are you asked if you consent to them doing this, or given a chance to opt out.  They make no mention of it whatsoever.

They are doing this via a plugin:

This all looks a bit sleazy to me – there is absolutely no benefit  whatsoever to the customer by having this plugin installed. I definitely don’t like the way they deliberately don’t mention they are going to give themselves a footer link. I guess they just hope you aren’t going to notice…

If you check the official Wordpress plugin site, it says:

There are only a few restrictions

1. Your plugin must be GPLv2 Compatible.
2. The plugin most not do anything illegal, or be morally offensive (that’s subjective, we know).
3. You have to actually use the subversion repository we give you in order for your plugin to show up on this site. The WordPress Plugins Directory is a hosting site, not a listing site.
4. The plugin must not embed external links on the public site (like a “powered by” link) without explicitly asking the user’s permission.
5. If you don’t specify a v2-compatible license, what you check in is explicitly GPLv2.

Hostgator are clearly breaking number 4. Given that their plugin does absolutely nothing outside of add an unwanted footer link, I can’t imagine Wordpress would be impressed with them doing this.

So which is it, genius link building, or a shocking way to treat paying customers? Let me know below!

24th June Update: It seems Hostgator are backtracking on this move. Dmytro Antypov, an SEO Consultant in Kyiv, just emailed me the following after complaining to Hostgator.

“Dmytro,

Thank you for your feedback regarding the HostGator plugin for wordpress. We have made a change to our installs that now require the end user click a check box if they want the plugin to be installed.

If you see any further issues or have any questions at all please let me know and I will personally assist you.

Thank you,

Josh xxxxxxx
Customer Service Manager
HostGator LLC. / SeoHosting.Com”

I’ve decided in the coming month we will be reviewing some of the more well known Wordpress Themes and clubs. I’ve already reviewed the Thesis Theme, so now its time to take a look at Elegant Themes. If you want to take a peek at their site before reading on, just click here (opens in new window).  As with all my reviews, this will not feature affiliate links, so you can relax in the knowledge I have nothing to gain by going one way or the other.

ElegantThemes.com – What am I getting?

Elegant Themes is a membership site, so you are paying for yearly access to all the themes. New themes are regularly added. The price is only $19.99 a year, paid by Paypal. There are currently 39 themes available for download. In addition to the themes, you get full access to the photoshop files for the themes, and a photoshop file for the logo itself.

Quality of the themes

The quality of some of his latest releases is nothing short of amazing.  Take a look at Personal Press, Glow Theme and Lumin as an example of what Elegantthemes.com can do. I love the way the thumbnail images are framed on Personal Press. Its extremely user friendly too, as you just upload whatever image you want, tag it as “Thumbnail” and the theme will resize it for you and frame it.

If you take a look at Glow and Lumin, you will see the impressive sliders with featured posts. These are extremely easy to set up from the admin area – again the themes will automatically resize your images for the featured part. You just need to select what category of posts you want to use for the sliders. You can also modify the slider speed, and set whether it should rotate through them automatically (which I would always recommend activating, I think it looks a lot more professional).

Are they good for SEO?

If you’re reading my blog in the first place, then you obviously have an interested not only in pretty sites, but making them rank. Elegant Themes have some SEO options built in, such as changing page titles, meta tags etc on a page by page basis. This is obviously nothing that you couldn’t do with external plugins, but certainly nice to have it baked into the theme. One less thing to worry about that could break or need updating etc.

Admin Panel – Any good?

All of the ElegantThemes.com themes work from the same layout of admin area, called the “epanel”. Once you have used one, you have used them all which is great from a time saving point of view.

Its a simple task to click on the tabs, edit your options and make alterations to your site. The epanel might take you 20 minutes to get used to as its certainly different from most other admin areas but once you pick it up its very quick to use to make changes to your site that in a lot of other templates would involve editing php.

There is options to add code to the header or footer, which would be ideal for adding your tracking codes.

I couldn’t take a larger screenshot on this small laptop, but on that screen you can use the visualizer to see exactly what colours you want, then simple scroll down and paste the colour code into boxes. So you can change the colours of pretty much everything from inside the admin panel.

Another part I love is the ability to turn on/off Author, Date, Categories, Comments – in too many themes you need to go digging in the source code to comment them out. No such problem here. You can also alter the settings for Thumbnails and choose whether you also want them added to individual posts or not (tip: enable this! Looks so much better). If you know you don’t want comments on the site, you can also kill them from every post with one click here too.

Support – is it included?

You get full access to a support forum while you remain a member.  The forum is broken down into a sub forum for each theme.  The themes are pretty easy to use out of the box, so to be honest I’ve not really ventured into the forum much. For the purpose of this review I’ve just taken a look, and some people seem to be asking questions about how to do very specific edits, and moderators are really going out their way to help – usually creating and posting the exact code they need to change. The support looks very impressive.

Is it worth the money?

Without doubt, Elegant Themes is the most underpriced theme package you can buy.  Its unreal to think if you sign up now you would be getting all the themes for 50 cents each, plus whatever else is released in the next year. At $20 a year, its a bargain. At $200 a year, I’d say the same.

I honestly think their price point is too low to make their affiliate program effective. They do have an affiliate scheme with a 50% payout (again I want to point out this review doesn’t use affil links). 50% is higher than industry average, but 50% of $20 is still only $10. It’s far more profitable for webmasters to promote Woo Themes or Thesis (Which are both still great themes/packages) than it is to promote the Elegant ones.

Conclusion

If you are working with Wordpress in any way whatsoever, you need to spend $20 and pick these templates up.  My blog seems to be getting known for scathing reviews, and since I refuse to use affiliate links I just tell it like it is. If I had used affil links in this post, I’d almost be embarrassed to hit the “Publish” button since its definitely the most positive review I’ve done so far

I’m trying to think of a negative point to finish off with, and pretty much the only one I can come up with is in comparison to some of his newer templates,  the first 5 he released are looking a bit dated. But hell, just ignore those 5 and you’re getting 34 templates for a bargain price. Not even like they are bad templates, they have just became a victim of the success of his later (more) awesome stuff.

If you want to check them out, click here to visit. Any questions feel free to post them and I’ll do my best to answer.

Backup-Technology.com have released a free plugin for backing up Wordpress sites online.

There is really no excuse for not keeping proper backups of your site – relying on your host to be carrying out suitable backups is not a solution either.

This plugin gives you 50mb of free space – more than enough for the average blog.  Its extremely easy to use:

Step 1: Download the plugin here.

Step 2: Upload the plugin to your blog using the Plugins > Add New > Upload feature in your WordPress Dashboard.

Step 3: Register for your 50 MiB of free space on our backup portal.

Step 4: Configure your plugin to enable encryption and provide the login details of your online account by clicking Change Settings on the Tools > Online Backup page.

Step 5: Schedule your backup by clicking Change Schedule on the same page!

For the 5 minutes to install and set up its definitely worth the peace of mind!

I intend this to be a internet first – a Thesis theme review without an affiliate link in it. I don’t think I’ve yet seen a 100% impartial review as they are all simply using it as a chance to drop several links to the generous 33% affiliate scheme.

The description of the Thesis theme on its author Chris Pearsons’ site says:

The Thesis philosophy is simple—you can change your design all you want, but you should never change the core code that powers your website. For long-term success in the search engines, it is crucial to serve semantic, information-rich HTML that loads quickly, and optimization and efficiency are two areas where Thesis shines.

We run 100 or so sites on the Thesis theme, and once you get used to using “hooks” to modify the layout it certainly is easy to do. But we have had several clients come to us after buying Thesis, totally confused as to how it all actually works. They had read all the reviews saying its the easiest template in the world to use, and that is just simply is not true.

Anyone with basic html knowledge can edit a typical Wordpress template. When you move over to Thesis you are taken out of your comfort zone. The following “using hooks” part is from a Thesis review by Nicholas Reese:

Using Hooks

For those unfamiliar with hooks here is a quick tutorial on how hooks work.

For take the following function which will print out a header.

<? function show_html(){ ?>
<h3>Here is a Header</h3>
<? } ?>

This header can be output on any of the available thesis hooks. Currently in version 1.51 Thesis has 49 hooks which build upon wordpress’s standard hooks. For example let’s say we wanted to show this header above this post to do this we would use the hook “thesis_hook_before_headline”.

So let’s combine this together.

<? function show_html(){ ?>
<h3>Here is a Header</h3>
<? } ?>
<? add_action('thesis_hook_before_headline','show_html');  ?>

The add action line basically says “at this hook” add “this function.” This example is very basic but you can do all sorts of customizations based on conditional statements.

For an average blogger (ie not a person actively involved in SEO or web design), this is confusing.   Yes, you can spend time and learn it but for a blogger without the skills, time or patience this is a route they may not want to go down.

As aledesma says on the Thesis forums:

I’ll go where the better user experience takes me for the least amount of time put in so I can really concentrate on what’s important – blogging

Many bloggers have no interest in learning useless php skills – they want to spend time blogging, not learning how to set up a blog.

This quote from Brilove on the Thesis forums sums up just how user friendly Thesis can be for novices:

For all of it’s many good points, Thesis isn’t as easy to learn to use is it is touted to be — a quick parse of these very forums will back that up. When masses of people need help to perform simple tasks like adding a header image or changing blog colors it might be a sign that your product isn’t user-friendly to the people who are buying it. Either that, or it is over-hyped and all of those people have the wrong expectations.

This is completely true – looking at the support forums right now there is a far higher proportion of people with simple problems such as making changes to the header that you just wouldn’t have in a “normal” Wordpress theme support forum.

I don’t want this review to sound overly negative – Thesis is a great theme, but certainly not for everyone like a lot of the (affiliate pushing) reviews that have been published would have you believe.

If you want to develop a lot of sites using one theme that can each be modified to look drastically different with a bit of practice, Thesis is an excellent option.

Similarly, if you want to build one high value site and have the time, skills and patience to learn it, again its a good choice. As an example here, I love Rae Hoffmans implementation of Thesis.

However if you are a blogger with one site, and no desire to have to learn new skills, or are short of time, I would seriously consider something far easier to use out of the box, like Woo Themes.

If you want to buy the Thesis Theme, you can do so here.