Bob Willoughby

Tag: thesis review

  • DIYThemes Releases Thesis 1.7

    Life is good and keeps getting better! It has been 2 years since Thesis was released and now Thesis 1.7 is out! And in his normal fashion Chris Pearson has done another excellent job!

    As I have said before I never thought that I would PAY for a WordPress theme. But I did and I am so glad! This theme was already awesome and it just got better.

    If you are new to Thesis you can read my review here: DIYThemes Thesis Review. So I will not repeat that.

    But let’s review what is “new and improved”.

    The Options Manager. This is and easy way to save your options to give to a friend, put on another blog, or backing up your options if you are getting ready to play with things. Just in case you break something you can get back to a good place. LOL

    New Dashboard Options. There are many more options to choose from. Some things that you had to put in the style sheet yourself can now be selected right from the control panel. Just for an example, I hate that “comments are closed” notice on each post or page that you have disabled comments on. So I would put a hook in each time to eliminate it. Where is that “Easy Button” when you need it? How cool is that? Don’t want your name or date to show on the posts? Just check a box to change it. Awesome!

    More help. There are more help features and tutorials to help you get started. And of course the more people that are using Thesis the better your chances of finding help on the net or in the forum. I can pretty much say that if there is something that you want to do, someone else has already done it and can show you how!

    The price. Even with all of the very cool new features, one thing that has not changed is the price. Right now it is the same. (Of course they did take away the rights of affiliates to give part of their commission as a discount. So don’t waste your time looking for a coupon code or any other discount).

    To read more about the new and improved features go to: DIYThemes Thesis right now! You will be glad you did. Because this will be the best and last theme that you ever need!

  • My Favorite New WP Theme: Thesis

    OK, so if you had told me a month ago that I would pay $164 for the Thesis WordPress Theme I would have just laughed. Why in the world would I PAY for Thesis when there are millions of themes for FREE!

    Well I have been thinking about my themes. Just about all of my personal web sites are on WordPress. Every time I start a web site, I start that never ending search for a theme. And just because it looks nice does not mean that it is SEO friendly. Nor does it mean that it will work in every browser. Especially after I get done messing with the code. Seems like I know just about enough to get into trouble!

    So I decided that I would get a theme that could be changed easily, was SEO friendly, and that could be made to look anyway that I wanted. The Thesis Theme started to pop up over and over again! Look at what I found on Google:

    Thesis Theme by DIY Themes
    Thesis Theme by DIY Themes

    I took the link from the bottom of the theme that you have to leave in if you get the Thesis Personal Option, and I put it in quotes. Ms Google came up with 2,450,000 results. Now most of these are people using the Thesis theme. But any way that you look at it, I think that it means a lot of people are using the Thesis Theme!

    So just what is it that I like about Thesis? Read my review.

    Easy to customize. You start by picking how many sidebars, and their placement. How wide are the columns. There are so many options to select from that I would be here all day going over them. No code knowledge required. Just work from the Thesis options screen in WordPress.

    SEO ready to the max. One less thing to worry about. There are many people designing WordPress themes that know absolutely nothing about coding for SEO. Your theme will always be ready with Thesis!

    Total control. You don’t have to settle for a sidebar on the left when you wanted it on the right just because that is the way the theme is. You decide how you want everything. And it is easy to change without ruining your site if you change your mind.

    No more messing with code. I constantly find myself wasting a lot of time trying to change things in the code and then fixing what I messed up. Or imagine spending hours fixing codes only to find out that IE7 doesn’t like what you did! Can be very frustrating.

    Works in all browsers. I have a theme that I love and it really works well with the niche that I use it for, but it doesn’t like Internet Explorer. Sometimes when you refresh the page the sidebars fly off into outer space. I have worked and worked on it and I can not figure out what the problem is. Those days are gone!

    Free upgrades. You have free lifetime upgrades with Thesis. And the best part is that Thesis is made for upgrading. You keep all of your changes and customizations separate from the core files so that they are not lost when you upgrade.

    Support. With so many people using the Thesis theme there are many, many avenues to get help. You can get on their busy forum or just type your question in your favorite search engine to find an answer. I can’t believe how fast I was set up and made my basic changes.

    Navigation bar. I am always messing with the code to get my navigation bar right. Theme designers think that you want to show all of your pages or categories up there. NOT! I want links, pages and whatever else strikes me. I want to decide. Thesis makes it so easy that a caveman could do it. (Sorry I couldn’t resist!)

    Learn one theme. If you work with just one theme you WILL eventually be an expert at it, no matter what your skill level is. No more wondering what you changed in a theme to make it react like you wanted it to.

    Bottom line. One of the favorite sayings at Thesis is “Do More, Code Less With Thesis”. That kind of sums it up. Stop wasting time and get Thesis! You will be glad that you did. I sure am.