If you want to promote yourself online, find someone competent and honest. Trust me, this company is not for you.

Frankly, I disagree that the Studiopress themes are ugly; I like them! I have to agree with you that they do have a visual “sameness” out of the box, but with some simple customizations such as a custom header, custom colors, layout selection, and your own widgets, they don’t necessarily have to end up looking that much alike.

I will check out the mysitemyway and Solostream themes. I’m always on the lookout for robust, well-coded attractive themes.

Even worse, by purchasing Studiopress themes you’re putting money into the fat pockets of self absorbed scammer, Brian Clark and the rest of his self styled, wannabe internet marketing “gurus” over at Copyblogger.

There are far better themes around that are built on a framework, have great SEO properties, have all manner of customisation options, have all the latest gizmos, widgets and gadgets and look fantastic. Examples include themes by mysitemyway and Solostream. Hell, I’d even take Thesis, despite it being made by that 24 carat asshole Chris Pearson, over Studiopress themes anyday.

I can not stop laughing… you are funny man )

I think one of the reason besides what you mention its because they are in HTML ..no PHP or ASP.
They are clean and easy to crawl by Google.

Second reason – they are old. Its important for Google to have an old website.
I like your topics

I`m sorry you have this problem. Hopefully they will fix this bug.

NEVER let someone else hold your domain name. It is one of your most valuable business assets and should be closely guarded. If you buy a website that comes with a domain name, open a GoDaddy account (they’re free) and INSIST that the current owner of the domain name transfer it to your account.

I am cognisant my clients’ vulnerability – of all that they canno tpossibly know – and I am very careful to act on their behalf in the same fashion as I would want a web professional to act for me.

I am currently involved in a web design project for direct sales consultants for a specific company. I have several competitors, most of whom offer an excellent product that any consultant who buys will be happy with. One competitor, however, consistently behaves unethically. On this person’s client sites are images that I have personally created for use by my own clients. Also on these sites is a significant amount of text copied verbatim from my own client sites. This person has represented on her profile on a major social networking site that she is a graduate of a local University, when in fact she is a high school graduate. This person represents that she is an experienced web designer when in fact she is not. Her client sites are inferior in myriad ways that only a designer can recognize.

But – as you so astutely point out in your article, this person’s clients don’t know the right questions to ask and even if they did, how would they know that the answers they are getting are false?

It is INCREDIBLY frustrating. I am a strong believer in the abundance theory – there is enough for all of us, and I welcome strong competition because it makes me better. But I am sick to my stomach to see people trusting and believing in a scam artist because they cannot possibly know better.

Clients are like kids sometimes, they seem to learn things the hard way.

It never hurts to have an attractive site but I’d put more effort into making your site one that first grabs attention and offers useful, unique content. The ‘prettiness’ can come later.