Pump Up Your WordPress with the Thesis Theme

by Aaron on September 3, 2009

I’m a big fan of WordPress as a blogging platform, and I highly recommend the Thesis theme for anyone wanting to get up and running with a search-engine-friendly, powerful system that can be customized and extended.

When choosing a theme, there are three general options:

Use a free theme
Hire a designer/developer to build a theme from scratch
Purchase a premium theme

Free themes have the downside of being of variable quality, and support is often lacking when something goes wrong. Hiring a designer to build a completely custom theme is a good idea, but it can get quite spendy if you find someone who does a thorough job. Thesis is a premium theme but it’s quite affordable (a single blog license is less than $90), and features a ton of powerful options that aren’t found in the vast range of free themes.

Why Thesis

Here are what I feel are the key benefits to thesis and how they can help a photographer:

SEO is Built-in: Thesis was designed with search engine optimization in mind. Having these features built into the theme mean that extra plugins aren’t needed to help you boost your ranking in Google.
Many design options can be set via an easy admin panel: Choose one column or up to three. Set the column sizes. Decide if you want to feature a rotating photo gallery. Choose which pages to display in a navigation menu (or add links that aren’t even part of your site). All of these options are set graphically without writing any code.
Excellent support: There’s a VERY active user community. I recently dropped in on the customization forum and found more than 40 different design/customization topics… and that was just in the past hour. The official Thesis support staff respond to inquiries in a timely manner, offering tips, suggestions, or bugfixes as needed.
Active development: Thesis is under active development, with new releases a few times a year offering enhanced features. As an example, Thesis 1.6 will be the next version and it will include a bunch of new options for menus and navigations.

Overall, for someone who isn’t a PHP developer, Thesis provides a great value, paying for itself many times over in the amount of time saved over either learning to write code or hiring someone to do the same. Check out Thesis and kick your WordPress website up a notch.

This post features affiliate links.

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Tagged as: blogging, themes, thesis, wordpress, wordpress themes

http://netninja.com/ Brian Enigma

Not to take away from your Thesis suggestion (I’ve looked at it off-and-on for months now, but still can’t justify the cost), but there is also a theme choice that fits somewhere between “free” and “custom.” The CSS in the default theme is beautifully designed. You can make zero changes in the theme itself, just the CSS file, and come up with some really great theming that looks nothing like the out-of-the-box default theme. This has the added bonus of being mostly forward compatible if and when WordPress updates the default theme (unless they make significant changes to it, for instance, when they added threaded replies). Obviously, you need to know a bit about CSS, and a tool like FireBug is indispensable, but I imagine that there are more webmasters/bloggers out there that know CSS than know PHP and the intricacies of the WordPress theme system.
http://netninja.com Brian Enigma

Not to take away from your Thesis suggestion (I’ve looked at it off-and-on for months now, but still can’t justify the cost), but there is also a theme choice that fits somewhere between “free” and “custom.” The CSS in the default theme is beautifully designed. You can make zero changes in the theme itself, just the CSS file, and come up with some really great theming that looks nothing like the out-of-the-box default theme. This has the added bonus of being mostly forward compatible if and when WordPress updates the default theme (unless they make significant changes to it, for instance, when they added threaded replies). Obviously, you need to know a bit about CSS, and a tool like FireBug is indispensable, but I imagine that there are more webmasters/bloggers out there that know CSS than know PHP and the intricacies of the WordPress theme system.
http://www.themepremium.com/ Harsh Agrawal

I have been using Thesis from 4 months and I highly recommend this theme to all.
It’s SEO and typography is amazing, more over Customization of Thesis might feel little
tricky at the beginning but once you get kick of it, you will enjoy editing and modifying this theme.
http://www.themepremium.com Harsh Agrawal

I have been using Thesis from 4 months and I highly recommend this theme to all.
It’s SEO and typography is amazing, more over Customization of Thesis might feel little
tricky at the beginning but once you get kick of it, you will enjoy editing and modifying this theme.
http://www.directorysubmissionservices.net Nick

Thanks for your review… Downloaded and installed the latest 1.7 version.
I was amazed to see the features inside panels. Though some of the features seems to confuse me..
But I’m sure their support forum is going to be very helpful..
Few things which I like about this is
I need less number of plugins
SEO optimized
Faster load time
and ability to control the typography
Installed Thesis Theme on my new blog and now need to redesign it..
Customizing is easy if I would have color sense . thanks for sharing..
http://www.dealzbydesign.com/pages/search-engine-optimization.html SEO Lexington KY

Great theme for beginners and site owners with SEO knowledge but little html knowledge. Great post.
http://www.submitshop.co.uk Submit Shop

Thesis means I don’t have to use a bunch of pluging . Couple these with Thesis‘ other killer features (including font face, size, and color formatting without touching any code) and I really do think that Thesis is a great way to make blogging easier.