If you have visited the blog in the last few days you may have noticed that it looks kinda the same but also different. That’s because I have updated it to the latest version of Wordpress and I am using a new Wordpress theme called Thesis.
I’d like to do a review with my impressions of the Thesis theme for all you fellow bloggers out there in the readership.
Easier , faster and safer blogging with Thesis
As you may know, the Thesis Theme was created by Chris Pearson (I’ve been a fan of his work for some time so this contributed to my decision to buy) and created/marketed by Brian Clark of Copyblogger fame. It is used by famous bloggers such as Matt Cutts at Google, Darren Rowse and SEO guru Michael Gray.
Now, here are my top5 reasons why I chose the Thesis theme:
- Beautiful typography and spaces. The new design structure looks quite similar to the old one. But with the new typography and right proportions of white space etc. it just feels more professional, beautiful and calming to look at.
- Flexible and easy to change and customize. There is a ton of options in the Wordpress panel that makes it easy to customize your theme without needing to go in and change a lot of code in your templates.
- SEO optimization. Thesis has a lot of built-in SEO functions and is designed to perform very well on Google etc. For me, it’s too early to know how Thesis will affect my search rankings. But I have already found that, for example, the ability to change the meta description for each individual post – and finally have a good description for the homepage – can be pretty useful.
- Less worry about breaking the site. You use separate files to customize your Thesis and to add new functions. I like this because then I don’t have to worry so much about breaking my blog since I’m never in the core files tinkering around. This was a problem with the old theme I used. It caused me to lose hours on boring work and made me slightly panicked from time to time as things fell apart. Paying for this theme just to have that problem out of my life for the next few years seems like a pretty good deal to me.
- Lifetime support and free upgrades. When you buy Thesis you get support via their helpful forum and also free upgrades of the theme for life.
To sum it up, Thesis is very helpful for someone like me that isn’t too good at the technical stuff and at customizing a lot of the code in a blog. This will save me time – and cause less worry about breaking the blog – and still leave me with a lot of design options over the coming years to easily change the look and functions of the blog however I want to.
So is Thesis worth the money I paid? Yes, to me it is. I look at this from a longer time perspective. A small, one-time cost for a more professional looking blog and two, three or more years of support, upgrades and easy ways to customize the look and functions of my blog is certainly worth it to me.
Click here to learn more and get your own copy of the Thesis Theme
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
nice, but looks like apostrophes from older posts are defunct
oh yes — and your blog is fantastic
Thanks for letting me know, Mark. I thought that problem was fixed but it seems to persist on some of the older posts. I’ll look into it and try to work it out.
It is a great improvement, the theme looks good, the improvements will be very helpful to all that read them and are waiting for the latest one. And it is faster loading +other optimizations, great, if there are little details that have not worked it is not the point ithas 100 more good things, noting can be perfect. Great Job. And thank you Henrik. With gratitude to your work and encouragement.
Thanks a lot, Tommy! I appreciate it.
Henrik,
I have been running my blog on Thesis as well. I have used many free themes and use some other purchased themes on other sites but none that seems to compare to thesis. The site looks Great.
One question: I don’t see how you made your right column larger than your left. Am I missing something – don’t see that in the design options
Thanks, Todd! You change that in Thesis 1.5 by going into Thesis Design Options/Site Layout/Columns and there you choose the width for sidebar 2 (mine is 290px).
Thanks Henrik,
Just upgraded – for free – like you mentioned in your article. Free lifetime upgrades — you can’t beat that.
That is a sweet feature – It widens the playing field tremendously. Thanks.
Twitter: @sagacious1
I also run Thesis on one of my blogs, the other seven I use a more flexible theme. Thesis was my first choice but although better than the free themes I’ve been using, it’s not as configurable out of the box as I was led to believe.
I do not know a thing about web design. I bought Thesis theme on a Friday and had blog site up Saturday!
Their support forums had everything I needed … and when I could not find what I needed… I just asked and got it.
-andrew
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.