Update Feb 2nd 2010 – after writing this, I decided to offer a couple of bonuses to deal with the shortcomings of Thesis. Skip to end of article.
I am a big fan of using wordpress to build websites.
I’ve worked with dozens of themes, both free and paid-for. I’ve done a lot of research. I’ve had many headaches resulting from themes. Lots of themes are junk, a handful are very good.
Yet…
Shortly after getting to grips with it, I transferred all my wordpress sites (blogs AND other content sites) to the Thesis framework. I also use it as the starting point for 80% of my clients’ websites.
Big yellow Thesis banners
q. Have you noticed how many big yellow Thesis banner ads have been sprouting up in the sidebars of your favorite blogs lately?
This says two things:
1 – Thesis is more popular than ever, and;
2 – (more importantly), Thesis users are proud to show off that their blog runs on the Thesis theme.
Yes, those yellow banners are often affiliate links, but the fact is that these blogs are using Thesis, and displaying a Thesis banner has almost become a proud emblem that says ‘I take my blog seriously, I invested in Thesis’.
This should be a strong signal to you that Thesis excels as a wordpress theme. No other theme’s users are such strong advocates.
What separates Thesis from other themes?
The goal of the vast majority of themes is to look pretty.
However, if you take only one thing from this article, it’s this – DON’T choose a theme based on looks alone.
Chris Pearson, the creator of Thesis, explains this splendidly:
If you’re serious about getting a new theme for your website, then you must understand that themes are much, much more than just designs. The most important thing WordPress themes do is serve your site’s underlying HTML, and as a result, themes are 100% responsible for your in-site SEO.
By extension, this means that choosing a theme based solely on its design is a poor, misguided decision. Also, this means that a good theme has a lot of responsibilities—it must provide rock-solid code and a savvy design, and it must be flexible enough for you to customize as your site grows.
The Thesis Theme is my answer to the problems associated with smart Web development, and I do hope you’ll consider the aforementioned factors when selecting a theme for your site.
While Thesis has some awesome customization options, it does so only AFTER serving impeccable, optimized code.
For me, these principles distinguish it from virtually every other theme out there.
The shortcomings of Thesis Theme
Thesis Theme is excellent and I highly recommend that you purchase it.
But it’s not perfect.
Here are two problems:
Inaccessible core wordpress files
If you are like 99% of others this won’t affect you, but if you are a hardcore web developer looking to make sweeping changes to core wordpress files, then Thesis will make this difficult for you – it takes over these files for its own use. However, check out Thesis’s hooks allows you to make a lot of custom changes on the fly.
Despite customizing, it still looks like a Thesis blog
To a certain extent, no matter what you do in the Custom Options panel in Thesis, somebody else might recognize your blog
Shortly after getting to grips with it, I transferred all my sites (blogs AND other content sites) to the Thesis framework. I also use it as the starting point for 80% of my clients’ websites.
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