Informal poll o' the day – which WordPress theme are you using?

So, which WordPress theme do you use?

It’s on my mind because today I saw that Chris Garrett, who I’m a pretty big fan of, recently changed his WordPress theme from Thesis to Headway. As noted in Chris’ post about said change he expected this to shock some people, and shock me it did. Chris has been touting the Thesis WordPress theme for a while, and while it was a long time ago, so I can’t say with 100% certainty, I’m pretty sure it was partially his first posts about Thesis that inspired me to use Thesis at my own sites.

Anyhow, so yes, I was surprised. Chris has this to say…

If you don’t want to code or pay someone else to, then I recommend Headway.

What Headway offers is a great theme that you can customise visually. You don’t have to know any of the geek stuff if you don’t want to. Simply drag items around to move them, point and click to change colours, and so on. If you want different pages to have a different look, perhaps different items in the sidebar, you don’t need to add any plugins or know any programming talk.

That actually fits in with what I said in my post about Thesis here at Blogging For A Living. Basically I love Thesis, but what I noted in my Thesis review is that Thesis users along with the Thesis website (to a point), tend to promote how easy this theme is to customize. Thesis was mostly easy for me to customize. That said, I’ve been messing around with blog design and code for a while. I’m nowhere near pro, but I can manage my way around css files, html and so on decently. However even for me there was a learning curve. There were some custom issues I had problems with and if you check out the Thesis forums, you’ll see all sorts of people at every blog design skill level asking questions as well.

In the end what I recommended was this; “If you’re totally new to blog design issues, Thesis may be too hard, and thus not worth the cash. You could stick with a free theme that already looks close to what you want OR pay someone cool to design your custom theme.”

In any case, I’m happy with Thesis and won’t be changing it up, but I figured I’d point you in the direction of the Headway post in case you’re not so geek savvy but do want a rockin’ personalized theme. Also, something to consider. If you do have Thesis and you haven’t been able to make it work as well as you might like, there’s a good plugin that can help – Thesis OpenHook. This plugin is ultra handy and makes Thesis just that much easier.

NOW you tell me – which WordPress theme are you using and why? Is there a theme you adore much more than the two mentioned above?

Oh and in keeping with the Facebook page saga – which by the way, I’m so utterly sick of this week because all of a sudden various clients of mine are like, “HEY we need a Facebook page! Weeeeeee!” right after I had to deal with my own; but I digress. In keeping with my saga here’s how to make everyone on Facebook hate you – try hard not to act like this when people friend or fan you. Good stuff.

Comments

5 responses
  1. Deborah Wall Avatar

    I started off with Thesis and have gone back and forward to free already designed looks because it feels so complicated to change the way my blog looks. As you may have guessed I’m a total newbie and code scares the hell out of me.

    However, I stumbled upon an article about Headway and figured I’d pay the nominal fee to give it a go. At first I stumbled around but I’ve actually adapted my page with it and it was so much easier to change colours and fonts, all the tweaky bits that I couldn’t figure out in Thesis.

    So I have to put my vote down for Headway.
    .-= Deborah Wall´s last blog ..To fall in love is easy, but it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes the person one desires to be. — Anna Louise Strong =-.

  2. Antonia Small Avatar

    I just jumped in – and had heard so much about Thesis, I thought that I would go there first. On further research/reading realized I was too much of a novice to make it worth it…headed into the free themes and found “Structure” which is relatively new. I love it. It isn’t completely intuitive to me yet – I’ve got lots to learn – but the design fits nicely with my website (www.antoniasmall.com). I can get in there, add images or text entries and it all looks sharp. I’ll take a peak at Headway.
    .-= Antonia Small´s last blog ..Wear Are You =-.

  3. Kristin Avatar

    I know, Thesis is all the rage with copy bloggers, etc.
    I’m using Canvas which is easily customizable – right down to the fonts for your posts and headers.

  4. Danica Avatar

    I bought the Signature theme because it appealed to my ‘one theme, six ways’ mind and found it was more complicated than handcoding my own. Then I found Cutline and unless it falls apart at the seams, it is likely to be the foundation of everything I use here on out.

    Thesis had a lot of hype, but nothing that seemed to really make it any better or worse for me as a writer. Besides, I’d been burnt once with buying a theme I’ll likely not use any time soon.

  5. Rick LaPoint Avatar

    I have one website each with Headway and Thesis. I ran into problems with Headway’s Visual Editor and a Plugin I wanted to use. The Visual Editor is a little squirrelly but works pretty well. The gripe I have about it is the 20 seconds or so it takes to load each time. Headway does have the Hooks built in, whereas Thesis requires a 3rd party plugin if you want to go the easy way with hooks.

    Headway’s Leaf system is interesting in that you can add code to each one separately, usually as a class reference to the main code you have stashed in the main CSS file.

    My Headway site is PartTimeTrader.com if you would like to compare the two.

    I built my new site with Thesis, the one you note below for my blog. Thesis has its own anomalies with another plugin I want to use, lol.

    Both took me about 2 weeks to put together nice enough for the public, but I got more creative with Thesis because both Themes have this “look” I wanted to avoid. I could probably achieve the very same look with Headway with about the same amount of effort.

    In the end, both require coding to get a unique look, and both make it as easy as possible to do that.

    Which will I use next? Not sure. I hear Thesis has “tighter, more stable code” which is what attracted me to it.

    Feel free to stop by the sites and sent me an email if you have questions.

    Rick LaPoint

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