One thing about blogs and bloggers is that link exchange is a popular means of networking with people. And another thing I notice is that most bloggers would love anything free–free services, free software, free hosting, etc.

However, most “free” things on the web aren’t exactly free. Most of the time, something is asked for in return. For instance, a free service might ask you to put up a link or a badge somewhere on your site. Another example, free blog software or plugins might have a condition that you put up a button somewhere on your sidebar.

Even a bigger thing would be widgets that you put up on your blog for various purposes, be they link exchange, RSS feeds, and the like.

Many blogs I visit have a lot of these buttons and badges, and frankly I think they tend to clutter the blog and lead to a bad user experience.

I have yet to come across a blog design that perfectly incorporates buttons and badges. But some of the blog-related services that we run at Splashpress Media ask users to link back, either thru an image or text link. Also, most of the blogs we run have ad buttons and badges. To lessen the visual clutter, what we do is put these in special areas on the blog. For example, a small box on the sidebar might be the best place to put buttons. Or perhaps, somewhere on the footer, below the copyright line.

I think this is one important consideration that a WordPress theme designer (or any blog theme designer for that matter) should consider. Bloggers will tend to add buttons, banners, widgets, and all forms of graphic and links on their blogs. So why not take this in mind when conceptualizing your design? Why not add areas on the footer or on the sidebar specifically to accommodate banners? Better yet, I think designers should package a users’ manual in the theme archive, and include instructions here on how to properly format or insert buttons, banners and text links.