WordPress theme – is Thesis awesome?
I’ve got two WordPress-based client websites under development at the moment, and I’m using the Thesis theme to style them both.
I’ve been building WordPress websites for nearly two years now, and I find using it as a content management system (CMS) offers some terrific benefits. I need the CMS features so that clients can run the sites themselves (upload their own stories etc).
First of all, in case you don’t know, WordPress began as blogging software in 2003, created by Matt Mullenweg, who comes from Houston in Texas.
I began creating blogs with it back in 2007 (after experimenting with Google’s Blogger software), but only really began exploring it properly for making websites in early 2009. At that point it was version 2.7. It’s now version 3.1 and it is becoming easier and easier to convert it from a blogging application to a dynamic website app.
It’s not an application with which you can make websites with little or no experience – unless you’re a whizz teenager. It’s been a very steep learning curve for me – it’s one of those things that requires you to have all the basic knowledge in place before moving on to the next step otherwise nothing from that point on will make sense. Once you ‘get’ it, once you understand how it works, it is quick and very slick.
There are 100s of free themes which are simple to upload, and they can be used to set a basic style for the site. And then there’s Thesis theme.
You have to pay for it, but the options it gives you to style the site are pretty amazing. From the Administration dashboard it’s possible to change font sizes, styles and colours, you can style the posts, pages and comments, you can add code snippets, you can change the layout to include columns of any width you choose, and tons more, including Javascript, tags, permalinks, photos, thumbnails, syndication and on and on. And there are the hooks which allow even greater modifications to be made to customise a site to an even greater extent.
But is the Thesis theme awesome? I think it is verging on awesome if you don’t know how to modify the CSS and PHP. It gives a great deal of control over modifications, but requires a lot of effort to learn (unless you’re a WordPress ninja). Should you buy it? That depends. there are a range of price plans, but essentially it costs $87.oo for one license. I think for what it does that’s a reasonable price to pay. However, there are plenty of commercial theme developers out there who have produced WordPress themes which have lots more functionality and a fair amount of customisation options. But even these can be confusing if you’re not familiar with configuring a CMS – and WordPress can easily bamboozle you.
Check out these commercial theme developers:
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