I have never been a fan of glaring “pay-per-click” and online advertising on personal sites because I feel it takes the focus away from the somewhat personal nature of my blogs. But I do believe that you have every right to ask for donations to support your work, particularly if you put in a lot of effort into it and generate a good product. Your users get to determine if you are doing a good job and they can make a donation if they like.
Now, I used to find it a bit corny to explicitly put a button that said “Donate” on my page, because, all said and done, I really had no expectations when I started work on Suffusion. Moreover, the “Donate” button seemed to me to have undertones of begging. Eventually, though, a few people offered to “buy [me] a drink” and that is when I thought about finally biting the bullet and putting in a link. I eventually put in a “Buy me a coffee” button on Aquoid.
I want my coffee!!
Why a coffee? I will be the first to admit that coffee only helps me to stay awake when ingested in extreme doses. For those who don’t know me well, I can get by with around 30 hours of sleep in a whole week and not show any side-effects, all without coffee. I can also get by with 80 hours of sleep a week – I am that weird, but that is a story for another day. The other options were a Pizza (unhealthy) and a Beer (I am a teetotaler). Though now that I think of it, I could have put in a picture of hot wings – something I love. Anyway, the coffee was merely symbolic and had no bearing on what I was really going to spend the contributions on (though I assure you it isn’t for nefarious activities 
).
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Thank you for the best WP theme ever! I definitely will buy you some cups of tee via paypal!
Thanks, Valerie!
You have made one of the best themes I have ever seen. I am writing a review on WP forum now and I am buying many coffees (if you live in India I think you are now in coffee heaven)
Thanks, Marc!
Love love love the theme so far! TY for creating it so user friendly and very functional!!
Wish I had money to give you
Hi Sayontan;
I am a programmer by profession, mostly in Delphi, C# with MySql back ends for distribution and manufacturing. I have a wordpress blog and decided to try expanding it with my own site and am experimenting.
I tried your theme, am still playing with it,and am impressed with what you have managed to put together. It fills a need for people like me who are tired of writing code and are looking for a means to focus on customizing a site with virtually very few limitations for our own purposes.
In short, great job.
Ichabod,
Thanks a lot for your comments!
Cheers,
Sayontan.
I am very impressed with your theme. I have just migrated my blog from the free Wordpress.com to Wordpress.org, and have looked at a lot of themes, both free and paid. Yours is the best I have seen. I’ve spent a few days fussing with the settings, and now I have a custom template that looks great, thanks to you! I hope to make the new url operational within a few days. (Have to update some of my content.) I will be sending some coffee very soon.
Thanks for everything you do, John
Thanks, John!
Suffusion is a great theme! I was able to put together a very nice looking blog. But I wasn’t getting as much traffic as I had when I was on the free Wordpress.com. I was wondering if the complexity of the theme (and particularly the featured-posts slider) make it harder for search engines? I switched to an old standard theme, and traffic is picking up a little. Don’t know whether the theme has anything to do with it or not. My question is, where do you think Suffusion stands regarding SEO?
Thanks, John
John,
Suffusion comes with SEO settings bundled. You can add information like keywords etc. Look at the SEO / Meta Settings under Blog Features. You can also try using SEO plugins like All In One SEO if you wish.
In short the theme is quite SEO friendly.
Sayontan
Thanks. Just the info I needed.