Update Nov 2012: Since this article was written, I have now switched to the Genesis Prose Theme and couldn’t be happier with this mobile responsive design. I no longer use WooThemes or Thesis.
Ditched.
It’s such a harsh word isn’t it?
Nevertheless that’s the verb many people have used in the past week when they noticed my new theme design.
Hey Lisa! Why did you ditch Thesis?
Let me make one thing clear. My move to another theme was less about any love lost for Thesis and more about finding what I needed in one theme and at the right time.
Update Nov 2012: Thesis 2.0 launched in October 2012 and in my opinion became less user friendly. I no longer recommend Thesis unless you are a developer. The reviews have not been good for the average WordPress user. Hopefully it will get better with updates, but for now, I recommend Genesis. That’s the theme I’m using now. Check out all their themes here.
I was actually planning on installing a fresh copy of Thesis on my local WordPress testing platform so I could redesign from the default design, but for whatever reason I just wasn’t in the mood.
My e-buddy Brankica highly recommended The Genesis Theme after using it for her new design — which I did eventually buy and used for NapturallyCurly. However, I wanted something different for this site.
About two weeks ago I remembered a Facebook fan raving about WooThemes so I decided to check out their designs. And while browsing through, it just so happened their Headlines theme had everything I wanted and more.
My wishlist for the new design included, but was not limited to…
- Clean (more white space, fewer colors)
- A customizable, all-in-one latest/popular post widget
- Space for a banner ad in the header
Could I have accomplished all this with Thesis? I sure could have, but not without more work than I cared to deal with at the time.
Not to mention, I fell in love with many of the additional WooTheme features I never even thought I wanted such as…
- An animated feature post widget on the homepage (I will probably go back to a partial static homepage like before, but I haven’t had time to tweak much yet. I still think it’s important for a blog homepage to have some static elements.)
- Dynamic post thumbnail features
- Tons of extra sidebar widgets, including ones for 125×125 ads, a Twitter feed, author box and more
- It’s also very AdSense-friendly with spots for AdSense in the header and top of the posts. All you do is paste your code into the admin panel. No plugins needed.
- Shortcodes to easily add contact forms, social media icons/buttons info boxes, [highlight]highlighted text[/highlight], dividers and more right into your post by using the WOO button on the edit bar.
But Wait…
Now having said all those wonderful things about WooThemes, I can’t lie. I immediately began missing several Thesis features.
Keep in mind, I had been using it for nearly three years, so it’s easy to forget how many of the customizations were specific to the Thesis theme only.
I was spoiled! 🙂
For example, if I wanted to change the width of my sidebars and post area with Thesis, I just had to go to the Design Options menu and adjust the values.
With this theme, I’d have to edit the PHP files directly and begin fiddling with <div> values — which can get messy.
I also love how easy Thesis makes it easy to customize the smaller details like nav menu colors, site-wide font colors and sizes, post bylines/meta etc.
Fortunately I’m pretty comfortable with CSS, so the changes I made weren’t that hard to pull off. However, a CSS novice may have gotten stuck.
My Customizations
So the theme you’re looking at now is pretty much Headlines out-of-the-box. I did upload my own red nav bar image that I made in Photoshop because the original was too small and so was the text.
I also tweaked the header CSS to make room for a 728×90 AdSense banner. The theme only allowed space for a 468×60 image. Fortunately the banner was already coded in so it was an easy tweak.
Also, this particular theme does not have hooks — which makes it easier to customize or add elements to different parts of your site (after the post, before the comments, after the header, above the footer, etc.)
Thesis was a pioneer with the hook functionality, and many themes have adopted it since. However, WooThemes does have a Hook Manager for their Canvas theme, just not this one.
So yes, Thesis definitely wins the “ease of customization” battle, however WooThemes delivered the overall feel I wanted with minimal tweaking.
For the record, I am not completely abandoning Thesis. If Chris Pearson EVER releases version 2.0 (sigh), I may revisit again to test out the new features. That’s a perk of having free upgrades as a customer.
But I’ve got to say, making those few customizations in WooThemes made me appreciate some of the Thesis features I took for granted for the last few years.
In Summary
Most themes have pros and cons, and I find it hard to find one that I like out-of-the-box.
Unless you’re going to code your theme from scratch (the ideal solution but not a desire for me) or hire someone, it’s usually about finding one that gets close to what you want and then tweaking it after the install.
At least that’s how I roll when it comes to WordPress themes. 🙂
Why I Don’t Recommend Thesis Anymore
If you are interested in learning more about why I stopped recommending Thesis altogether, click here.
Have you checked Thesis2 and compare that with Genesis?
Yes I have and I didn’t care for Thesis 2.0. I wrote a post about it last month. https://blog.2createawebsite.com/2012/12/17/thesis-wordpress-theme-2-0/
With the caveat I’m a 3-year-old Thesis user (and have yet to upgrade to 2.0) with basic programming skills but in love with the ease of changing things as you reference above comparing Thesis to Woo, how is Genesis better?
Hey Ari,
I personally just like all the different child themes they offer and the fact they have a bunch of different widgets (including the header). The support is awesome and I support anything Copyblogger comes out with. So many different reasons. 🙂
Are sure is that what happened,how sure are that tomorrow you change your mind if you get better offer because i could remember what you posted about Thesis huh,tell us the truth you got better affiliate offer?
Actually I earn much less as an affiliate with Genesis. Thesis costs $200, Genesis only costs $59. It’s pretty easy to check this yourself. Nice try though. 🙂
Which theme is best for beginners on WordPress? I heard Woothemes is good for beginners and the Canvas theme they offer looks highly customizable. I may try Genesis but I heard that it is for someone with more CSS experience to get the look you want. Is that true in any Genesis fans opinion?
I do very little if any customising to Genesis child themes.
The latest themes have fully widgetised areas where you just drop in your own content.
Most themes also have a choice of colours.
Find a Genesis child theme you like and go with it.
Hi Lisa
I’ve been a Genesis man for 12 months now and I love it.
I use Genesis child themes on all my own sites and all client sites.
Themes are great and the support is fabulous.
The people over at Genesis are also pretty friendly.
Hi Lisa,
I am a bit confused… you talk about Woo, but the Headlines theme is Genesis… Are they the same thing or what?
Hi Andrea
You must’ve missed the updated note at the top of the page. I switched to Genesis. I no longer use the Woo Headlines theme. Genesis is waaaaay better.
Sorry about that. I had seen it, but got kind of confused reading the post. My bad:)
Will you write a post to say why you switched?
I was looking at Genesis and Woo (I had already given up on Thesis as I could not understand what I would get from looking at their website…) and what I liked about Woo is that you can downloaded a free theme to have a play about and the tabbed sidebar widget (with the latest post, most popular and something else that I cannot recollect…); I think both features are missing from Genesis.
However I have not made a purchase yet and I am not planning to change theme for a few weeks yet, so there is time for me to cheese, so it would be great to hear from you.
Oh, one more question… if you have just changed theme, why have you not gone responsive?
Cheers.
I advise all new clients to go responsive and I’ve recently gone responsive on my own site with the Genesis Minimum 2.0 theme – got to practice what you preach!
I have a post showing all the Genesis mobile responsive sites – won’t leave a link but please contact me via my contact form if you want details.
Hi Lisa,
I’ve been following this post for awhile now and it has been very helpful. Thank you..
Do you have any advice on switching my content site with SBI to the Genesis Theme you recommended?
My site is very photo based and I don’t think SBI templates do it justice (without custom CSS, etc). The site is also relatively small and I still need to convert my old BB1 pages to BB2 anyways so I thought now would be a good time to jump ship. I also think a blog format is more of the direction I want my site to go in with daily pictures, stories of interest, etc. Thanks in advance.
Kevin
Hi Kevin
To be honest, there’s no easy way to do this. It has to be all manual. So you’ll have to copy-paste your content into your new WordPress pages. Those two platforms are not compatible because with SBI! you’re dealing with static HTML pages and with WordPress, it’s written in PHP.
Hi Lisa,
Thanks for the quick reply! I thought it would be an involved process switching over to WordPress. Is there a way I can build the site on WordPress (maybe with a different domain name) and then when it is finished transfer my original domain name over? My big concern was losing the ranking of my original site and keywords that have been built over the last four years. Thanks again and I love your blog! It has been so helpful.
The only issue with doing that is you would need to setup a redirect from the old domain to the new one. So that would still mean you’d need to move the SBI! domain to a host that allows 301 redirects because I don’t think SBI! does.
Thanks again Lisa! I may have to hire someone on elance to help me with this. I saw another SBIer bidding out the job of converting their website to WP. I may also just stick with SBI since the education they provide is outstanding and the next site I start will be on WordPress from the start.
Lisa, I must say with the New Thesis Theme 2.0 you made the right call to leave, because nothing about it is newbie friendly.
If a person don’t understand how CSS, and HTML works then it’s not worthing getting. I have it and I must say it gave me a run for my money at first, it makes you want to just break out “Sublime Text 2” and do it by hand.
Not really sure why they did it like that unless their trying to attract more developers vs. newbies but ether way you made a good call.
Think it’s time for me to start looking around too, the only problem is it seems like the Thesis websites just rank better, not sure if it’s just me making excuse or if it’s something really to it. Hum!
Thanks,
Willie
Hi Willie, I saw a video on someone’s blog and I was like Yikes!! This is horrible. After three years, that’s what Chris came up with? He clearly did not design that with the end user in mind. Seems there was too much emphasis on the backend and it being so robust, but the end user should be the priority.
I don’t think Thesis sites rank better. That’s all hype and marketing. SEO is so much less about the framework. Yes it does have some impact – especially if your theme is just coded poorly, but most premium themes are SEO friendly. I am using Genesis now and love them.
I noticed that Thesis has a basic version and a developer version. In the developer version, one gets to use Thesis for multiple websites.
My question is: what prevents someone from using Thesis on multiple websites with the Basic Version? In fact, another question: what prevents someone from using Thesis after requesting a refund? I’m not saying I’m planning on doing this because I feel that the prices are reasonable and the service deserves compensation, but I’m just curious on how the backend of all this works.
Hi Aaron
I guess it’s an honor system. That’s one of those things that would be hard to control.
I have to agree with alex here – I’ve built a few sites over the years and all things being equal my sites built with thesis always ranked better than the ones built using other themes.
What so ever, thesis theme still is the best in all ways. Specially the SEO, it’s second to none.
I still love Thesis. In terms of getting a solid website built quickly I have yet to see anything surpass what Thesis offers.
I recently built http://itcareerpaths.com/ in Thesis and I think it looks pretty good and didn’t take me too long to do it.
To each there own I guess.
Lisa, I was wondering if you wanted more features out of your thesis theme why not just add a Thesis Skin? So why not just go with a Thesis Skin?
You keep all your Thesis features and the only thing your changing is your design options folder.
Willie recently posted.
I have been surfing online more than 3 hours these days, yet I by no means found any attention-grabbing article like yours. It is beautiful value enough for me. In my opinion, if all web owners and bloggers made good content as you did, the web will probably be a lot more useful than ever before.
Right now I am confused on Thesis or Genesis. many internet marker pros I follow use Thesis for their blogs but they are good programmers as well. I dont know any coding. Can you please tell me which will be good for me Thesis or Genesis
Hi Lisa – For your Headline customizations, did you make that in a child theme? If so, do you have any info on how to set that up in Woo themes? I have the 14-day trial and chose Canvas and can’t figure out how to set the child theme without having to create a new theme. I’ve used Catalyst theme and it’s straightforward on parent/child theme modifications. Catalyst is extremely customizable, but the learning curve is very high. Any insights on how best to modify a Woo theme using a child theme would be appreciated! Thanks!
That is the trick! Finding a theme that is feature rich, yet simple. I often find themes that have everything I want, but have thrown in one too many wiz-bang effects to leave it looking busy instead of clean and simple.
Changing to other themes must be hard for our readers when they have been already accustomed to the theme of our site. But this will only be in a shorter period, reader can re-adjust easily and be happy specially if the new theme has a nice design than the old one.
hmm, i’m using thesis right now. still in my 30 day return period. thinking of getting rid of it also. not sure what all the hype is about thesis.
Lisa, do you have any experience with a Themeforest theme called U-design??
The hype came from the fact you an arrange the columns, widths, colors, etc. right from the admin panel. However, today there are so many themes that do the same that it’s not as big of a deal. Never used Themeforest.
Lisa, I recently replace my domain name and I changed my theme to Woo. I love the options and the flexibility. It is a great theme. I lost my ratings because of the domain change but I figured it is better to make the change now than later when my site is more established. My site is recovering fast.
Glad you’re recovering and like the Woo theme!
Thanks for the summary Lisa – I’ve seen more people using Woo recently, and I DO like the clean look you’ve got with this site. As you say, it’s always a trade-off between the best features on each theme – none quite seems to have it all! I’ve been using Headway for a while which I love!
I like this theme. I may have to look into it for my own blog. Although I like WooThemes also.
hey lisa, i got a good information from your post. Thesis is awesome at least one can make his website stunning with little code. But it seems to me that it is costly.
Hi Lisa, I am not sure why experts are moving away from Thesis Theme lately. I’m not a developer I don’t even know proper ABC of codes! For me Thesis Theme development is way to expensive and original version is too plain. However, I cannot ignore the fact I love thesis features or maybe I haven’t tested any other theme other than Thesis theme.
I have tough question for you and straight forward answer needed 😉 :)…
Which theme would you suggest for a person with no knowledge of coding?
Thesis, Genesis, Or Woo Themes?
Thanks
genesis frame work is the best . thnx for the post
I love Thesis and will never leave! Probably. 🙂
Lisa, I must commend you for using such a harsh word….ditched, most don’t use it quite often even if they find something useless or ineffective.
Genesis Framework and never looked back…
I am loving Genesis as well.
Hi Lisa,
I think WooThemes is great. They make things a lot easier to customize + very SEO friendly. Thesis is a little archaic in customization. Your site looks great!
Theme looks great, i use Thesis with almost all my sites. But one thing about Thesis is the 2.0 version a myth or is it real?
Genesis is seem to become to next Thesis 2.0
I also like this theme your using now, i’m going to check out the themes they offer to see if i like any that i could use for my site. 🙂
Lisa,
Love your new theme design. I have also move from thesis to my custom coded theme as I can’t customize thesis to what I am after to. I want to be honest that when I move to new theme that I design myself, my ranking fell down 🙁 . But I love my new theme now LOL!
Can’t afford to buy premium design themes. But will gonna check them as you use them LOL!
what theme of woothemes is this?
Headlines.
hi Lisa,
Just wondering if the word press theme required you to leave the footer credits intact. Were they requiring you to do so?
Well, I’ve always liked woothemes more than Thesis. Thesis is really ugly by default.
I like what you’ve done with the redesign Lisa – it looks much better. And I was just starting to get comfortable using Thesis…
You are looking at someone who used to change his Wordpess theme almost as often as most people change their underwear! 🙂
Thankfully I stumbled across Thesis and my current theme a couple of years ago and I haven’t even thought about changing.
I have used a couple of the free themes from Woo Themes and found they didn’t display properly and back then I was a novice who didn’t know how to edit themes.
I must say I do like the new look. 🙂
LOL! I used to be the same way, Dean.
I love this new theme much more than your previous Thesis theme. It look much better and professionally designed.
hi lisa….
i am a new blogger and want to grab traffic but i am not able to do that…i always hear that search engine optimisation and keyword selection is most important thing..but i am not a seo specialist..so what i did is just customized my website with firecow theme and it’s great….
i also like thesis and genesis…but i preferred firecrow and it’s awesome..
nice post
Haven’t been on the site in a little while Lisa, I love the new theme! I did the same as you but I found mine on ThemeForest.
I really like the new layout from Woo Themes. It looks so “clean”. I noticed the latest-most popular menu on the left right away as I always look for those on my quick glance through you site to get to the latest post. I have you on reader but your site is also on my favorite bar and I click there first all the time.
Small ridiculous pet peeve is I started to read they Why post (latest) and wanted to go back to the home page. Guess what no home page in the menu. So I did click the 2create logo after hitting blogging on menu first. So where is my home page?
Anyway thanks again for all the good info you provide. I think you have yourself a winning new theme.
Edward Melton
I have yet to be fully satisfied with a single out-of-the box wordpress theme… I echo your sentiment about wanting a theme that will allow you to put a banner/header up. It bugs me that I can’t do this with my current theme. I’ve been looking closely at artisteer themes… there is a cost, but they seem very design-able and highly functional. Have you used artisteer themes before?
I’ve only used Artisteer for static sites, not blogs. But I’m getting ready to launch a video on my 2createawebsite youtube channel that shows you how to add things to your header. Maybe it will help you with your banner.
I did the same thing on one of my sites that is more focused on my consulting business and selling selling info rather than blogging.
Then I did the same thing on my blog till I started looking at on page SEO optimization and realized the new theme I used does a tremendous job of on page SEO optimization on landing pages but it fails miserably when you use it as a blog.
The scary reality from my experience in consulting is Thesis hands down crushes all the competition when it comes to on page SEO optimization.
To put that in perspective I’ve worked on content management systems that have cost companies tens of thousands of dollars and their basic SEO is absolutely horrendous.
So for me to get the best of both worlds I installed thesis in my root where my blog exists and put the other theme that flat out rocks for building sales / squeeze pages in minutes as long as your copy is pre written in a different directory on the same domain.
I’m just a stickler for having H1, H2 tags populated with the relavent content for the desired page.
I think these days people think on page SEO factors are worthless, however I did some work a few months back for Tetra and all we focused on was on page factors and they saw a 40% bump in organic traffic in 90 days.
I like this new theme you chose. I have had a tough time working with both Thesis and Genesis themes. I find myself continuing to use themes from ThemeForest, since there are several developers constantly evolving what is possible within the WordPress backend.
I am a big fan of the Genesis also, but I’ve been testing a few different themes lately to get the right one. It’s hard not to want to change your theme every now and again, I can relate. Thanks
I like the new look Lisa. It is cleaner. I wish I could take this and plug it into an SBI site.
thats true. the site is cleaner. it struck me once i opened the site and i was delighted with the new look
Well i would have see this theme far more good @ your site Nice customization
Who am I to quetion why you ditch The wordPress Thesis theme, you obviously had impelling reasons for doing so . Thanks for sharing them.
Your new theme is great! I’m trying create a new wordpress theme for my blog too. But I’m not sure it optimize for SEO or not. Can you give me a hint or a tool that can check SEO for new theme?
I’ve always found Thesis to be confusing and hard to customize. I’m a big fan of Graphene
Nice to hear that you are going for the headlines theme, Just a few weeks before you changed the theme for this site I made my new site here with the headlines theme.
Although I haven’t made all that many changes its just one of those themes that make you feel like the sites going to be successful!
I am also going to change the widget section the left like you mentioned in an email newsletter which is a very simple yet not obvious tip! I think it could be exactly what I needed 🙂
Thanks alot lisa, keep doing what your doing! Your extremely quickly growing my trust as a fellow internet marketer!
Infact you kickstarted my IM presence and boomed from $200 per month to $1250 and getting higher every month!