Paid WordPress Plugins: Pros & Cons of Using Free Blog Themes – Hot Blog Tips Hangout. This Hot Blog Tips Hangout will be discussing the use of free themes on your blog. There are Pros and Cons to using these themes and you need to be aware of them before you make the decision as to if you want to spend the money for a paid theme or find a good free theme. As you will hear, there are definitely things you need to watch out for when choosing a blog theme. Mitch Mitchell of imjustsharing.com recently had an issue with using a free theme for a client’s site. It could have been costly and could also be avoided if you know what to watch for. At 6 Ben Barden of quickblogtips.com talks about Image Licensing and the confusion of Creative Commons when using some Flickr images. 8 Mitch explains that he used a Flickr image, gave attribution and still had a complaint from the image owner as to where the attribution link should lead to. 9:42 Brian D. Hawkins of hotblogtips.com tries to remember what copyrighted code was running in a blog program and people were being threatened with lawsuits. 12 Ben talks about some of the hidden code and links he has found in free blog themes. Remember that Ben does code, he knows what he is looking for. 14:12 Ben and Brian talk about removing bad links in a theme and how it may break the theme. At 16:30 Brian and Ben talk about potential SEO issues when using free themes. Can the code quality cause an issue? 18:26 I (Sheryl Loch) bring up an article about free theme sites and the tools used to check themes. Why You Should Never Search …