Review of the Thesis WordPress Theme

I’ve been blogging for more than five years and have bought multiple WordPress themes (aka designs) and used countless free themes. Although I liked many of them, none provided easy code and design customization and stellar support until I found the Thesis WordPress Theme.

I’ve been using this theme for several months as part of a content management solution for websites and to run blogs, and I can say I’ve found the theme I’ll use for the rest of my blogging days.

Why is the Thesis WordPress Theme so Great?

1. Support: When you buy Thesis, you are able to join a community of Thesis users who offer you answers and suggestions on how to use Thesis better to manage your website and achieve your goals. An additional plus is that you can see how other people are using the theme and get ideas and inspiration.
2. Design Freedom: Thesis comes out of the box looking plain ‘vanilla’ yet attractive. If you had to do so, you could use Thesis without graphics. Most people don’t want to do that, so it’s good news that Thesis can be customized with graphics and color changes. With a few edits to a ‘custom’ file, I can change the background and outline colors of my theme and change how my header navigation looks. I love this feature because I can see how a variety of options look before making my final decision. If I change my mind, it’s easy to make a site-wide change.
3. Creating Pages: When you create pages, they are not automatically placed into your site navigation as they are in other themes. Since you might want to create pages that don’t appear in your overall site navigation, this is quite handy. If you do want a page to appear, you check a box and you’re done.
4. Multimedia Box: With this box, you can insert video, a photo, or a series of rotating photos or even advertising. What makes this remarkable is that your multimedia can be changed page by page and even post by post. If you write a post about Thesis, this one for instance, you can include a related graphic of link to an affiliate program on the same page. (To see an example of this, be sure you click on the title of this post.) It makes so much sense that you would tailor your ads based on what the visitor wants to see. Brilliant!
5. Search Engine Optimization: For my small business clients, this theme is attractive because it makes optimizing a blog post simple. A few input boxes allow you to add meta tags, a description and a custom title tag.

I’m wondering if this theme can wash my car, too.

Are there drawbacks? Yes. If you know absolutely nothing about PHP or CSS and don’t want to learn, then you’ll want to get some help. That’s where the helpful support forum comes into play. You can ask any question about Thesis and receive a reply rather quickly. I’ve always received a reply within 24 hours — often less.

To make the most of the design modifications, you’ll want to make some modifications to the code. The good news is that you can find cut-and-paste code on blogs related to Thesis, and these posts show up when you put your question into Google. I’m far from a PHP programmer, yet I’ve done fine with adding code to customize my sites.

I encourage you to look into getting this theme. If you already use it, please let me know what you think about it in the comments.

Tagged as: Thesis WordPress Theme