Sponsoring a wordpress theme is a popular way of building links back to your site. A good wordpress theme can reach thousands of people and find its way onto a huge number of screens.

Seems like a good idea, doesn’t it? Paying a designer a small amount of money and getting a lot of links in return.

It’s not that simple though. Many designers have now started putting links back to unscrupulous websites in their theme designs and this course of action has caused many to be distrustful of sponsored themes. As with many things in life, a small unethical minority has ruined a potentially profitable opportunity, both for the designer and for the sponsor.

But, I think there may be an answer to this problem. If sponsorship is absolutely open and integral to the design then it won’t be something that appears to be intrusive or underhand. For example, if I design a wordpress theme for a band and then release a modified version of that theme for free public use, is it acceptable to include a link back to my website, as the designer, and to the band’s website since they are associated with the theme? Obviously this would be done with the prior knowledge and consent of the band, indeed, in many cases the client may be happy to pay to have this extra exposure.

Is this a potential way to keep everyone happy? The designer gets paid for the theme and for the inclusion of the link. The client gets a custom theme and exposure via a back link in the derived free theme. The blogger who uses the free theme gets a high quality design as a result of the investment of the client, and is presumably willing to accept an associative link back to that client.

Whether or not this would keep Google happy is another thing all together. This idea could run into trouble because of all the bad feeling surrounding sponsored themes. That shouldn’t stop it from working though since the all important associative link would still be on thousands of screens, bloggers would still get a good free theme and the designer would still get paid.

I’m very interested to learn your thoughts on this since I am in the process of designing a theme for a band I work with. The band would benefit greatly from increased exposure from a derivative theme released to the public with an associative link.