Theme Review: Blue Columns Monetized Theme

When a new client came to me this week and asked me to configure a blog, I was presented with an interesting dilemma. He is an active participant in a missing person case, who has been on many talk shows and news programs. I was to be creating and maintaining the blog and hosting it on my servers. I would also own the domain name. The first thought that came to mind was HEAVY monetization because this website will be generating up to ten thousand hits a day. The second thought was this is a missing person case, and I don’t want to be seen as capitalizing on someone else’s misfortune. So I compromised and decided I would put enough ads on the blog to cover my overhead and I needed a theme initially that would let me place Adsense ads (I was avoiding any other affiliate ads for this blog) in the spots I felt would generate at least enough money per day to cover the fairly high hosting costs.

The theme I settled on (and changed quickly from) was Blue Columns monetized theme. Initially this seemed like a good fit. Two spots already came pre-configured for AdSense in decent placements. I liked the overall color scheme as well, blue and white. It was very simple and two the point. It also offered nice looking RSS buttons and a newsletter signup.

This theme was highly buggy from the start. I had to do multiple PHP edits just to get individual posts to display properly. The footer had an encrypted code set-up, which usually is ok by me, but this time it pointed to some highly suspect websites. I didn’t want my client to feel I was leading him down a sketchy road by making it look like these people were advertisers for the website. The code to make the newsletter work was a nightmare, it took me about 2 hours and STILL wasn’t working. I just gave up at that point. In addition, every title screen had its own JPG that had to be edited. After two days and countless hours, I gave up on this theme and went to a heavily modified version of the Acosim theme.

Every free theme you find online has its quirks. This one was full of more bugs than any I had used. The first initial feeling I had was it was a slick looking, monetized layout. That is still the case. But it takes more work to get it running correctly than any serious content blogger would like.