Thesis is a premium theme that has a number of features that make it a great choice. Thesis makes it easy to make your blog look exactly the way you want for Google to find your site and index its content.
Thesis is Great for Search Engine Optimzation
Thesis has a number of features that make it strong for SEO:
- Custom tags for title, meta description and keywords – this means you do not need the All IN One SEO Pack plugin
- If no custom tags are supplied then Thesis uses the post title as the title and the first 160 characters of the post content as the meta description
- Allows you to set noindex, nofollow meta tags on categories and tags page preventing duplicate content issues
- Makes it easy to set up your RSS feed
- Thesis encourages you to set up a meta description for your home page
Thesis makes is easy to give your Site a Distinctive Look
All of the following are easy to do using the Thesis Options and Design Options
- edit your fonts and styles
- configure one, two or no sidebars
- configure whether the order of the sidebars; content left, content middle or content right
- configure the width of the sidebars and content sections
- control what goes on your navigation menu: pages, categories and links
- control how many teasers go on your home page
- control if tags and previous and next post links are displayed
Thesis is Easy to Customize at Low Cost
Customization here covers two aspects; adding features and functionality to your blog and also making more dramatic changes to layout.
- Thesis options make it easy to add scripts to your header and footer
- It is easy to move the menu to the top or bottom of the header
- Makes it easy to customize individual posts or pages through Thesis hooks and custom functions
- makes maintenance much easier as it keeps all customizations in a single file custom_functions.php in the thesis/custom folder
- Thesis makes it easy for you to create ‘skins’ which are quicker and hence cheaper to create that building an entirely new WordPress theme
Thesis has a number of Cool Features that Delight your Visitors
The following are all about adding visual interest to your site, giving it a distinctive look and help to get your message across:
- Use teasers to create summary pages showing excerpts of your posts
- Use the multimedia box to display images or video or any other content on your site
- Use the Feature Box to create an eye catching message and call your visitors to take specific action
- Embed enticing images within your articles without having to learn CSS
- Automatically generate thumbnails of your images which add visual interest to your teasers on the summary pages
Thesis has a active community of users that can help you
The Thesis community is growing. Ask a reasonable question is the forum, having checked that it has not already been asked and answered, and you will typically get an answer from one or more experienced Thesis users who can help.
So as you can see for all the reasons above the Power Blog Service uses the WordPress Thesis Theme because we believe that it is a solid foundation for a business website that helps the site owner get more visitors to their site and then convert those visitors into customers.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve heard tell of a recent competitor to Thesis. It’s called the Headway Theme.
How does it compare to thesis?
Is it easier to use (for us non techies?) Is it as complete in terms of function and support?
What’s your take on Headway?
We are currently evaluating Headway. If it’s any good for our clients we’ll add it as an alternative to Thesis on the Power Blog Service.
Russell is adding Headway to my personal blog (lizjamieson.co.uk) as I type. If you check it in an hour or so and it is messed up, you’ll know we haven’t got the hang of it yet! I love doing things live.
Just because something is drag and drop doesn’t always mean it’ll be easier all of the time. Just taking a look at the Headway forums there are still people asking about how to do fairly simple things and the answer is still use this code (and they are pointed to some CSS). So it doesn’t appear to remove the need to code. Support forums are always a great place to find out how well a product is doing.
I can give a better answer when I’ve had a chance to check it out.
.-= Elizabeth´s last blog ..How To Add Links To Other Web Sites From Inside Your Wordpress Post =-.
How about compatibility between Headway and Wishlist Member (which this site seems to be using)?
I use Headway; it’s pretty great. (More for the control it gives you than for its ease of use). But I’m wondering if anyone’s heard whether it functions well with Wishlist Member.
Have no idea at present. We are still testing Headway out. This site does use Wishlist Member, but not for much longer. We’re moving to a different membership site archtecture as Wishlist had some integration issues with 1shoppingcart that we could not work around.
Thanks for the reply, Elizabeth. I realize this is getting off topic, but what is the best alternative(s) to Wishlist Member?
Anthony,
The short answer is probably aMember. But we have not tried it so this is a theoretical solution at this point.
This is our current thinking based on experience.
Good Combinations are:
The issues are
We do recommend WishListMember with Paypal integration if you can live with a single payment provider.
Very helpful!! Thank you!
Hi Elizabeth and Russell,
1. Infusionsoft
Received a newsletter (or two), one from Infusionsoft which you were testing or first implementing. Wondering what you think of it and potentially migrating from A Weber or l Shopping Cart.
2 Headway
Any progress on evaluating Headway, say, compared to Thesis?
Hi Paul,
We are completing the migration from aweber and 1shoppingcart to Infusionsoft this weekend. The issue for us was lack of support between the membership plugin wishlist member and 1automationwiz (a flavour of 1shoppingcart). Aweber is great but it does not make sense to use it when we are paying for infusionsoft. I would still recommend Wishlist Member but only when combined with Paypal and Aweber.
I abruptly stopped using Headway yesterday on my blog after the widgets all disappeared. I will go back and try again again later when I have some more time.
My initial view is that Thesis has better code quality and is better suited to me as a developer. I think Headway is pitched more towards the graphic designer market.
With Thesis, it seems all pretty easy; add your code in custom_functions.php and style the site in custom.css. With Headway I need to learn a new paradigm before I can get started. However, I think Headway offers you more flexibility over page layout. But for me content is more important than presentation so I can live with Thesis.
Going forward I can see us offering both Thesis and Headway at the Power Blog Service once we have developed some level of competence with Headway and proved to ourselves it’s a good thing for our clients.
Russell,
Thank you for your comments comparing Headway and Thesis.
Regarding Infusion (and your migration from l Shopping Cart and A Weber, I am not looking at the technical issue you mentioned, but wondering if you have an opinion on the functionality (seems broader than l Shopping Cart) and the ease of use in setting up autoreponders, work flow, newsletters, shopping cart, offline customer.
Probably it’s way early for you to have an opinion, but wondering if you or Lizzy has looked at any of these issues.
Paul,
Infusionsoft is vast in its scope, while sendpepper and aweber focus on marketing, infusionsoft does all that, plus an affiliate system and a shopping cart.
In the last week we have taken a pragmatic approach and concentrated on getting the shopping cart and email marketing going first. As you suggested it will be a few weeks before we implement the offline marketing pieces, the campaign planning and financial tracking.
The advantages of infusionsoft for us are that it is proven, has great facilities for customer segmentation, and allows us to do all our prospect and customer management in one place.