Thoughts on Thesis From A Blogging Beginner

So after dabbling around with tons of different crappy free themes for wordpress, I finally decided to take the leap and pay for my first premium theme. I looked around and did a little research and I found many people were talking about this them called Thesis. My first thought was ok, this thing is apparently awesome but why would I want it if everyone else has it. I don’t want my blog to look just like everyone else’s in the blogosphere. Well, after I researched a little more I soon found out that one of the reasons Thesis was so awesome was because of how much you can customize it. So here are my thoughts on all things thesis. I hope this helps you out if you are on the fence about wether you should purchase thesis or not.

Price

Alright first things first. How much does this baby cost? Well, there are actually 2 different options.

Personal Option $87
Developer’s Option  $164

Basically the only difference here is that with the personal option you are only allowed to install the thesis theme on one website. The developer’s option you are allowed to install the theme on an unlimited amount of websites that you own as well as have the option to install it on a client’s site too. Installing the thesis theme on a client’s site will cost you a little extra but to do this at all you have to purchase the developer’s option.

It’s important to remember that no matter which option you choose you still get access to everything that thesis has to offer, the only difference is where you are allowed to install the theme.

I decided that I would go with the cheaper personal option because for now I only plan on using the theme for this site. If I ever change my mind and would like to launch a new site I can always get a discounted upgrade price and grab the developer’s option.

Installation

The actual installation of thesis was not too difficult. Pretty much the same as installing any other theme. There is one thing you have to do after you install thesis in order to take advantage of its full functionality that can be a tad difficult if you are a newbie. Don’t worry thought it’s nothing too bad and they have tutorials on their site, and if you don’t like the ones they provide there are plenty of other bloggers out there that have posted tutorials as well. A quick Google search will find them for you pretty quick.

Basically all you have to do is change the “permissions” of some files on your server so that thesis can write to them. I’m not a genius with this stuff but I know enough to stumble my way through stuff like this. Basically you are just giving thesis permission to access a few files on your server so that it can perform at an optimum level for you.

Don’t let it scare you. It’s not a big deal, but I did think it was at least worth mentioning.

Customization

Alright you got it installed. Now what are you going to do? Actually, as soon as you install thesis, it is ready to go, but it’s going to pretty vanilla unless you add some of your own touches to it.

When you are at your wordpress dashboard you will notice there is a new button on the side that will say Thesis. In there you will be able to pick how many columns you want, background colors, text colors, link colors, text size, etc. You can literally change hundreds of things just with a few clicks of the mouse and strokes of the keyboard, and the best part is that it is designed in a way that you don’t have to know a single thing about HTML or any other type of programming.

This is awesome for us beginners because we can get a professional looking blog right away without having to hire someone to help us or spend hours of our valuable time learning how to do it ourself.

Although they make it super easy to customize thesis this way you can get even more creative even if you only have a tiny amount of programming knowledge. They use what are called hooks to be able to customize just about anything you want on the site. I’m not going to go into detail here because I really don’t know that much about them, but another quick google search will turn up lots of information on them.

SEO and Support

Here is where thesis really starts to kick ass. Their SEO is freaking awesome. You don’t even need to have the all in one SEO pack plugin anymore. On each individual post and page you can customize the title of the page, meta description, and meta keywords. It rocks. I don’t know anything about the programming part of it, but from the research I have done, the way the theme is coded is supposed to be kick ass for SEO as well. I have already noticed my site is getting indexed by google more as well as showing up more often for people’s search terms. So as far as SEO goes, I would say if it’s not the best then there is a tie for the best. I don’t see how it could get any better.

The support community also is awesome. Regardless of wether you get the personal or developer’s option you will have access to the support community. Basically it’s just a message board where people get on and ask/answer questions. Because thesis has become so popular there are many knowledgable people on there than are more than willing to help you out. So if you run into any problems when trying to make changes to your theme, you are sure to be able to find an answer there.

Should YOU buy it?

ABSOLUTELY!

This was the best money that I have spent on my blog so far. Ok it’s the only money I have spent so far besides my domain registration (I have access to a free server), but it was well worth the money. It saves me from so many headaches that I was constantly dealing with when I was using all of those crappy free themes.

So if you are thinking about getting a little more serious about your blog and you want to take the next step into making your blog more SEO friendly, easier to sue, more professional looking, and customize the hell out of it, then buy thesis right now. Trust me its worth it.