Thesis Theme Review
When my techie guru installed WordPress on my server for me, he recommended that I get Thesis Theme for WordPress.
He told me, "It's just a really great base theme to work from. It's what the default WordPress theme really should be. Very easy to customize, good practices out of the box, lots of design settings you can make without needing to touch code."
According to the Thesis Theme website, over 35,000 people use Thesis Theme for WordPress. Is it worth buying? Find out with my Thesis Theme review.
What Thesis Theme offers is more than just a WordPress theme. It's a point and click system to help you customize the look and feel of your blog, by editing the layout, navigation links, fonts, display options, etc., without having to touch the CSS or HTML code.
I have years of experience with HTML but my CSS knowledge is quite basic, so this sounded good to me. I went with the Developer's Option because it allows me to use Thesis Theme on every site that I own, and I don't have to retain the attribution link in the footer. I just didn't like the idea of paying for the software and giving the author a link as well.
A word of warning
The Developer's Option allows you to use Thesis Theme on an unlimited number of sites that 'you' own. It doesn't allow you to use it on your clients' web sites. For that privilege you have to pay $40 per site. This option is only available in the Developer's Option.The Personal Option only allows you to use Thesis Theme on one site and on a localized development server. The footer attribution link must remain intact. You may however upgrade to the Developer's Option from the Personal Option for $77.
I'm no techie but I installed Thesis Theme onto my server myself by following their easy to follow instructions. It was relatively easy.
I've been using Thesis Theme for a week now. I love tweaking designs and Thesis Theme has made it so much easier and quicker to tweak the design without having to hunt down the right code to edit in the CSS or HTML templates. Time is money so if a tool can save me time, then that's good enough for me. I'm sure some people would expect a lot more for their money, but I consider it money well spent.
If you don't intend to use Thesis Theme on more than one blog and can live with the footer attribution link, then I suggest sticking with the Personal Option. You can always upgrade later on. And if you're comfortable with CSS, then Thesis Theme probably won't help you much.
I always had trouble changing from 2 column to 3 column and back again, and adding/removing tabbed navigation links in my old blog. Thesis Theme makes that a doddle.
Having said that, it's not perfect though. For some unknown reason Thesis Theme doesn't have options to change the font colors, only the size and font typeface. So I had to search the files to find the right color variables to change which is time consuming. Thesis Theme does has a nice feature that lets you add custom CSS changes to a custom.css file so that the changes are not lost everytime you upgrade to the latest version.
Conclusion
Overall I would recommend Thesis Theme but only if you aren't comfortable editing CSS code manually. It could save you a lot of time and headaches. It is a bit expensive for what it offers, and as such I give Thesis Theme a score of 7/10.
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