I’ll keep this column short and sweet because I’ve just delivered the manuscript to the third edition of Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog to my publisher. That’s right, another one for you guys to spend your hard earned money on (or download from The Pirate Bay, I guess) so that I can continue to feed my single malt addiction interest.
So here’s the punchline, served up like a Talisker Distiller’s Edition from 1994: Theme developers need to chill with all the bloody options!
Options are great. I like to have options, and I imagine I would if I relied on commercial or free themes. But enough is enough, don’t give me a settings page with 37 choices. In fact, if you can deliver a kick-ass theme without a settings page at all, more kudos to you. Most settings will just risk ruining your balanced design anyway. If not for me, do it for yourself. You deserver it, being brilliant and generous and all, sharing your most excellent work with the WordPress community. I’m not even being sarcastic here, I truly mean it. This is for you. You.
Now don’t get me wrong, sometimes settings are needed and I’m all for that. Just make sure you question their existence, and if you really want to add a ton of cool stuff, consider doing it in a plugin or by releasing a child theme instead.
Keep it lean and mean, folks.
And with that I’ll get back to feeling bloody great about having delivered yet another book manuscript, by enjoying this most excellent single malt. Yeah, I deserve it.
Photo by kaktuslampan (CC)
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January 27, 2012 
I completely agree. My big problem is that developers and theme shops are using customizations and theme-specific shortcodes to keep WordPress users from switching themes.
It’s almost not even about providing value anymore. It’s about customer retention…
Well said! Now I’m waiting for your Scotch recommendations post. ;) The more peaty, the better!
You got it! :)
Absolutely true!
There are MANY premium themes out there I avoid to use it since they’are TOO MANY options and I really get confused!
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Couldn’t agree with you more, Thord!
Another side to this equation is how theme authors respond to users who are requesting more and more and MORE options every day. You can’t just say “No” and leave it at that. You have to educate your audience. It really is an artform trying to educate your users about why less is more and why feature creep is not in their long term best interest.
Rightly so, most theme authors don’t want to teach their users. But IMO if they want to be really successful while achieving usability Zen, they must.
I totally agree.
I feel like theme developers are adding options to their themes just because other themes have those options, not because they are necessary or helpful to the theme.
If you have to learn so many unique settings, options, and short codes just to get a theme set up, you might as well just learn to program so you can create a theme yourself.
Personally I am of the mindset that while theme frameworks are great for developers, the average Joe Public would rather just have a theme that does one thing and does it really well. I don’t imagine they really want to configure a hundred buttons and knobs just to get the theme looking like it did in the screenshot.