JaypeeOnline

One of the things that make WordPress attractive, aside from its features and functionality – is the large collection of free themes and plugins which can be easily installed on any WordPress blog. Unfortunately, not all of these themes are good quality-wise.

In an effort to boost and improve the current selection of themes, Automattic has launched “The Theme Team” who aims not only to create good quality WordPress themes but also to help aspiring WordPress theme developers and attract more quality theme submissions from developers, making sure that there will be lots of good quality themes available for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Here’s a short introduction from the WordPress.com blog:

I’m super-excited to announce to you today that WordPress.com now has an official Theme Team. In a nutshell, we’re a bunch of people who really care about WordPress Themes and want to see them get better and better—on WordPress.com and for every WordPress.org user. And yes, that means we’re getting more themes, more often.

Here are some of the goals that the WordPress Theme Team hopes to achieve:

1. Every WordPress.com user should feel like there’s a theme that fits them perfectly, that is exactly how they want to present themselves to the world, that they’re excited to show to their friends.
2. We want everyone to feel a sense of momentum and ever-increasing possibilities, and to do so we will present as many perfect-fit WordPress themes to as many WordPress.com users as we can.
3. We will ensure all of our public work represents the best in coding practices, web standards, and technical excellence.
4. We will craft all of our themes to have a consistent user experience and meet our users expectations and hopes.
5. We will teach WordPress developers to become the best theme developers in the world. If you’re a WordPress theme developer—commercial or 100% free—we want to help you be the best.
6. We will ensure all our improvements make it back to the open source community.

This is definitely good news for the whole WordPress community! As a WordPress user/advocate, I’m looking forward to the new themes that the Theme Team will be creating/releasing. This move will help WordPress retain current users, attract more new users and at the same time, compete with other blogging platforms and other free blogging services like Blogger.

What do you think of the Theme Team launch? What do you think of their goals? Is there anything in particular that you want the Theme Team to do or address in addition to their goals? Please share your thoughts.