This past week I’ve been playing with and setting up the WordPress theme Thesis by Chris Pearson. I had read just about everywhere about the theme and how good it was SEO wise, so I thought I would check it out since I have a few blogs that use WordPress vs Drupal.
Not being able to look under the hood without actually buying the theme made it difficult to see what it was all about. Most of the sites that I had visited, well lets just say there where many mistakes being made that would be so easy to clean up if they only took a little time to do it.
Then again maybe they just don’t know about it. Today there are so many experts out there talking about setting up wordpress, of course will to charge the unsuspecting for it. Many web hosts have it setup to install it fairly quick and easy.
So what did I find different about the Thesis theme? Previously on my wordpress sites I had used the revolution themes, which where pretty easy to customize. If you know a little about php, you can do some pretty neat things.
I ended up installing the 1.5b Thesis theme “note the b it’s a beta version” there is at this time 1.4.2. Just about everywhere I looked everyone had pretty much left the theme almost just like it came. Yet that’s not my style, I like digging under the hood so to speak. One of the things I did not like about Thesis, yet is really is a minor issue if you know how to clean it up is the multiple CSS files.
The Bloat
Some of the sites that I had looked at no less then 15 external Javascript files and 11 external CSS files. I think this is where drupal really shines, it’s the ability to aggregate and compress the CSS files into just one. The Java files are aggregated but not compressed. The lack of aggregation and compression is a WordPress issue, not a Thesis theme issue.
I was very impressed with the support forum at diythemes.com, lots of people in there asking questions to issues they where facing which ranged from CSS issues to more complicated issues. Having a good support forum is essential for any piece of software, often you’ll find a few golden nuggets that lets you take it further then maybe even the designer imagined.
One of the things I’ve always liked is tabbed navigation with drop down menus. With a little CSS styling and a graphic I quickly set it up, now if I only knew how to use my Photoshop CS3 better I could create a decent header graphic for the site. You can see what I did in an afternoon here at Nav60.com with the site and drop down menus.
Thesis Options
This was one area that was a nice addition to any wordpress theme, simply select the options you want or do not want.
Display Options
- Title Tag
- Document Head
- Archives
- Tagging
- Comments
- Sidebars
- Administration
Customize Your Thesis Design
- Custom Stylesheet
Syndication/Feed
Navigation Menu
Multimedia Box
Stats Software and Scripts
Thesis Design Options
Fonts and Font sizes
- Body and Content Area
- Content Area
- Nav Menu
- Header
- Headlines
- Bylines and Post Meta Data
- Code
- Multimedia Box
- Sidebars
- Footer
Layout: Columns and Widths
Home Page Layout and Content
Feature Box
Post Images and Thumbnails
Framework Options
As you can see from the list about, the Thesis theme gives you a lot of options to play around with, allowing you to really customize the theme to you. With just two pages to click on for options it is much simpler then Drupal, yet as far as I can tell at this point is not quite as easy to manipulate as Drupal. If you’re looking for a great theme then you could not go wrong with Thesis for WordPress.
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“This past week I’ve been playing with and setting up the Wordpress theme Thesis by Chris Pearson. I had read just about everywhere about the theme and how good it was SEO wise, so I thought I would check it out since I have a few blogs that use Wordpress vs Drupal.”
thnaks you admin.