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Still not Using Thesis?
If you aren’t using Thesis, chances are it is because you are skeptical about the price and the whole idea of paying for a Wordpress theme when there are 1000’s of free ones out there.
Now I definitely don’t blame you for being a bit leery, but deciding not to use Thesis purely because of its price tag could actually be costing you more in the long run.
What is Your Time Worth?
Let’s face it Your Time is Valuable! The second you realize that spending hours tweaking a free theme is actually more expensive than buying Thesis, you should applaud yourself.
Not only will you start to save time with Thesis, but in my experience sites just rank better in search engines. Now when I sat down to record this video review of Thesis, I began to look back at how it changed the way I work. After some inspection it really became apparent how drastic of an impact Thesis had made on the way I built profitable sites.
Here is a quick outline of how I worked “Before Thesis” and “After Thesis.” I think this illustration will really help demonstrate the value in using Thesis.
Building Websites Before Thesis
In the past I would have spent at least 2 hours searching for a “Free” theme which looked like it could be “minimally” tweaked to meet my new site’s needs. I would then learn how the CSS and XHTML layout worked and then start making changes. This would often entail editing quite a bit of PHP.
The whole process often took ~10 hours and on many occasions several days to end up with a site design/layout that I was satisfied with.
On top of that I would then have to spend even longer making it SEO friendly by replacing various “markup flaws” which is a huge hassle and guessing game in itself!
Building Websites With Thesis
I simply install Thesis through the Wordpress theme area. Then I venture over to the Thesis Options/Design Options, (this is the fun/easy part) and tweak the general layout and color scheme to meet my needs. I am confident that Thesis is SEO friendly and is ready for content. This whole process has never taken more than an hour.
Thesis Saves Time
All in all Thesis really does save you time in the long run. If you are still working the way I used to, you can bet that Thesis will change the way you approach building websites and save you more time than you ever thought possible.
Thesis Has Oustanding Support
Now you might be thinking, “What if I want to do something that isn’t offered in the options panel?” Well DIYThemes and Thesis have an outstanding support team which have successfully helped tons of people customize Thesis to suit their needs. When this post was written there were 5,626 threads in the “Customization” section and 1,989 threads in the “Support” section of the DIYThemes forum. If this doesn’t prove to you that Thesis has above average support then I don’t know what does.
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Nick Reese is a full time internet marketer living in Austin Texas. When Nick isn't managing web properties he enjoys biking, wakeboarding, and drinking tea. You can read more from Nick Reese on his website and follow him on Twitter @nickreese.
Nick has written 25 awesome articles for Art of Blog.
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I want a WordPress theme that is suited for a website with multiple pages. Would Thesis be a good choice. I am also considering Flexibility as a WP theme. Can you address the two points please.
Best Regards
Ron
Ron, after looking at most of the Premium themes on the market, Thesis still stands head and shoulders above other themes with regard to easy of customization. I would need to know the specifics of your needs to better address whether it would suit your needs perfectly.
I personally have not reviewed Flexibility, but if you are doing anything out of the ordinary with your site I would recommend Thesis because of its support.
This is by far the best part about Thesis. It’s support community is unrivaled. If you have an issue they are more than happy to help you with it.
If you are looking to do sales pages. I would also suggest thesis because you can easily use a “no sidebar” format to make a clean sales page. Trust me, it converts well. :)
I’m a neophyte to wordpress and websites in general. I had a website built last summer, realized for SEO I need to integrate a blog, and hired someone to do that who transferred my website to a free wordpress blog theme. I’m still working on SEO and marketing, both of which are relatively new to me. I’m wanting to do things like be able to create landing pages, create custom call-to-action buttons to get to those pages, and generally be able to play and experiment with what seems to be working to convert visitors into customers. I want to be able to make changes myself without always having to pay someone and it taking weeks!! Would Thesis be the way to go even though I’m not a web developer?
Renee,
If you are interested in tweaking your website (yourself) and want the best on-page SEO you can get from a theme I would definitely suggest Thesis.
The main factor supporting this recommendation is the fact you will have the Thesis community behind you when you do customizations. If you are already tweaking a “free” wordpress theme then I am sure you will like the idea of Hooks which makes Thesis, incredibly easy to customize.
Also remember that Thesis has a money back guarantee. I would definitely give it a spin.
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I don’t want to have to have my current website down while I’m creating a new one. How easy would it be to be copying images, CSS, or text from one to the other without being a website developer??
Renee, I typically set up a separate testing server to move the content over and get the design right. Moving a site from one theme to another can take time.
This is exact reason is why Thesis’s “future proofing” will help a ton. That way when you need to make changes or redesign in the future your underlying source code will change very little.
Hello Nick. I am interested in starting an investing website or blog – not sure which one at this point, as I am still researching the pros and cons. If you have an opinion please share. It sounds like I must first create a WP account in order to use Thesis for a blog. Is this correct? Or, can Thesis be used as a stand alone application? Must I obtain a domain name first? Secondly, and most importantly to me, can Thesis support advertising in addition to Google Ads? Thanks.
Allan,
It sounds like you could use a few pointers. :) After reading this comment definitely check out our One Week Blog Series. I think if you follow it you’ll learn a ton and be better suited to get started in making a successful Finance blog. Markus talks about Domains, Themes, and a ton more!
As far as Thesis is concerned. You’ll want a self hosted wordpress account (covered in the series). Thesis is a “Theme” for Wordpress which basically adds a ton of features to the core of what Wordpress offers.
With Thesis, you will have access to a “multimedia box” which can work great for serving advertisements, but a real Thesis ninja can do some pretty slick things around the whole site as Thesis is incredibly flexible if you have some basic CSS/PHP knowledge.
Best of luck to you! Feel free to comment on the series if you have more specific questions.
I know what it’s like to spend hours looking for a theme you like but want to tweak and spending more hours tweaking it.
Then spending even more hours out there trying to get your stuff noticed by people who hopefully appreciate what you have to offer. I haven’t tried Thesis yet however, when I do have the money I think I will definitely give it a shot for it’s money.
I know HTML and CSS to a point and I know it can be a long time to get anything up and going that is even on the line of what could be called “ok”.
I’m a business planner, not a webmaster and I don’t want to spend months learning code. I installed Wordpress and built two sites using free themes, but both have serious flaws. For instance, using DarkBlue 1.3 by William Sutanto I built my branded site adrianbray.com. The landing page is a static page, with the blog on a subsidiary page, but I can’t get “comments” to appear on the blog page. Some minor code fix is no doubt needed but it shouldn’t be that hard to get basic functionality going. There are many other similar problems like a date appearing at the top of my static page (in Mozilla) as if it were a blog entry. Turning to Thesis, the demonstration videos show a lot of cool formatting tools (tweaking colors etc.) but is the basic functionality intuitive? One recurring theme I see with Wordpress is that because it started as a blogging platform, all the forum comments seem to refer to how someone has built a great blog using it. But does Thesis make Wordpress work as well for basically static sites?
Adrian,
To date, I feel Thesis is the easiest to learn blogging platform. I will admit that it does have a large amount of features which can take some adjusting to. Out of the box Thesis has many powerful options but you will have to tweak them yourself. I would say “take the plunge” and give Thesis a try and if it doesn’t suit your needs they do have a Money back Guarantee.
Hi Nick, Thanks for the overview of Thesis.
We are adding blogging / article contribution to an existing B2B directory site. We want to share adsense revenue with contributing authors. To do this we want to insert a piece of code from Google Ad Manager (which will rotate our adsense code with our contributing author’s adsense code ) either on the page sidebar or in the post itself (probably on the full post page, not on the excerpt) I assume we could insert this in the multimedia box. However I need to match the GAM code to the specific author. Each other has a different piece of GAM code. So I guess I’m asking can we manage information presentation in the posts and sidebars by author?
Also I don’t see much about plug-in integration. Does Thesis work with the more popular plugins?
Thank you , Norm
Norm,
You can definitely do what you are trying to do with some custom PHP. Sounds pretty straight forward.
As far as plugin integration, Thesis has support for widgets and several other popular plugins. If not I am sure there are work-arounds in the forums.
I must say this is a great article i enjoyed reading it keep the good work
Super super! I totally agree that Thesis pays for itself in no time! While all of us could figure out PHP and HTML and the coding, it is indeed the *time* we spend that we need to really be cognizant of. I am so happy I got Thesis. Great video and instructions. Thanks!
Is Thesis similar to Thematic?
Can you compare these?
Marc,
We checked out Thematic before deciding on Thesis. We decided to go with Thesis because overall it looked like a better solution and it was developed by Chris Pearson and endorsed by more SEO’s than you can shake a stick at like Sugarrae, Michael Gray, and even Matt Cutts uses it. (If that isn’t an endorsement I don’t know what is)
We personally have had great success with Thesis and I won’t be launching a site on a different theme for the foreseeable future.
It looks like Thematic has similar features without a pricetag, but as I mentioned in the video. Free themes always have a pricetag, so if that is your deciding factor I would give Thesis a long hard look.
I’d recommend getting the personal version of Thesis and giving it a spin. If you don’t like it take them up on the guarantee. I highly doubt you will be disappointed.
Everything about Thesis is very exciting. What I don’t understand is why NO ONE mentions that the theme is only useful if you use wordpress.org and not wordpress.com. It is a simple but significant distinction. How many times must DIY deal with disgruntled customers requesting a refund because this wasn’t made crystal clear to them? Maybe a simple REQUIREMENTS paragraph would suffice?
Great review! I’m sold!
Do I need to pay something extra directly at Wordpress or I get to upload Thesis on my “free hosted blog”??
Thanks! :)
Thesis can only be used on Wordpress.org sites. In other words you must have a self-hosted blog.
Thanks Nick! Nobody told me before…
Hi Nick
We want to be able to offer our clients a wordpress blog of their own, using the Thesis theme. It sounds like we can do this, but what are the rules concerning use of developer edition Thesis?
The Thesis reg page says “A single Client Site Option is $40, but you can also purchase 5 and 10-site Client Options for $36/site and $32/site, respectively”
But I’ve also seen mention that there is no re-seeling ‘allowed – what do you mean by re-selling exactly – I presume you mean that you can’t just download a copy and then flog it to someone else.
Your clarification appreciated.
cheers
Paul Stephenson
Paul, you would need an exact response from someone at DIYThemes, but from my conversations with Chris, I understand it that every site you don’t personally own or have a business/client relationship you will need a developers license. So if you wanted to work with clients to set up a Wordpress blog using Thesis you would need a client site license for each one. As far as if you charge your client’s more than the $40 that is up to you. Hopefully this makes it clearer.