Thesis Theme for WordPress: Options Galore and a Helpful Support CommunityI’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.

These other posts might be of interest to you:

  1. Thesis Just Got Better: An Easy to Customize WordPress Theme
  2. Six Plugins You Don’t Need if You Use Thesis
  3. WordPress 3.0 is Released: New Menus, Theme Options, Better Help

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

I’ve talked about how much I love Thesis, but here’s a reason that doesn’t usually come up in first conversations: Thesis means I don’t have to use a bunch of plugins. Why does this matter? Because each plugin is one more bit of overhead that runs when your blog serves up content, and it’s one more piece of infrastructure to keep maintained and up to date.

Thesis contains so many great features built into the theme that these plugins aren’t needed:

  • All in One SEO Pack – features a wide variety of SEO options, most of which are built into Thesis.
  • Ultimate Noindex Nofollow Tool – this plugin lets you improve your blog’s search rankings by “noindexing” pages of your choice (such as archives, categories, tag pages, and so on). Thesis has all of these options built in.
  • Feed Locations – using Feedburner or otherwise want to give your blog visitors an alternate feed URL? You can do it with this plugin, or you can do it with Thesis.
  • Google Analytics – this plugin will insert your Google Analytics script (or you could manually edit your theme files), or you can simply paste the script in through Thesis’ admin screen.
  • Post Teaser – generates a preview/teaser of a post, with a link to go to the full post. This is a built-in feature of Thesis that can be configured any number of ways.
  • Multi-level Navigation Plugin – adds multi-level navigation menus to WordPress. Thesis implements this same functionality using WordPress’ nested pages features.

By not running six separate plugins, my site has a reduced overhead and maintenance load. 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.

These other posts might be of interest to you:

  1. Pump Up Your WordPress with the Thesis Theme
  2. Thesis Just Got Better: An Easy to Customize WordPress Theme
  3. Upgrading WordPress: It’s Easy

Tagged as:
seo,
themes,
thesis,
wordpress

I’ve blogged previously about why I think Thesis is the best WordPress theme. The folks at DIY Themes just released Thesis 1.6, a new version that adds some incremental updates along with some really nice new design and customization features.

Thesis has always offered menu-driven customization for things such as number of columns and the navigation menu, but with Thesis 1.6 they’ve extended the point-and-click customization to new things such as color schemes – you no longer need to edit a custom CSS file for many design changes on a Thesis website.

Check out this video to learn more about what you can do with Thesis 1.6:

(if you’re viewing this in a feed reader and don’t see the video, click through to the website)

If you already have Thesis, the new version is a free upgrade. If you don’t have it… head over to the Thesis website to learn more and get the theme. I promote the heck out of Thesis (and I have an affiliate relationship with the company) because it’s a really great theme that can provide huge benefits for a blogger without much effort.

These other posts might be of interest to you:

  1. Pump Up Your WordPress with the Thesis Theme
  2. Six Plugins You Don’t Need if You Use Thesis
  3. WordPress 3.0 is Released: New Menus, Theme Options, Better Help

Tagged as:
seo,
themes,
thesis,
wordpress,
wordpress themes