Thesis Makes You Awesome (Why I Love Thesis)

I have been working with the Thesis theme for Wordpress for almost a year now, and I am going on the record right now to say that I think it’s the best, most flexible, most customizable, most kickass theme for Wordpress around.

I use Thesis for all of my personal and business websites (and that’s a lot of websites), and I also use it to create websites for my clients, unless they’ve requested something different.

Here are the top five reasons I love Thesis

As a web designer AND web developer (I code the websites I design, and deploy them on the web), Thesis has been a powerful tool for me to use. Yes, I can code everything by hand, but I would be silly to skip using a fantastic tool just because I CAN do it by hand.

REASON NUMBER ONE: Thesis is version-upgrade-safe

I can’t tell you what an awesome, awesome thing this is, unless you have had the experience of upgrading Wordpress and breaking your theme. EVEN IF you backed up your database, your entries and categories, and your entire website – one upgrade snafu and you’re back to the drawing board. Ugh.

Not only is Thesis safe from Wordpress upgrades, it’s safe from its own upgrades. Thesis regularly comes out with new versions that include even better options, and you can upgrade without fear – because all your custom work has its own folder that isn’t overwritten by the update. It’s incredibly smart planning.

REASON NUMBER TWO: Thesis users who are non-tech-savvy can change things around

This is especially awesome for my clients, most of whom don’t need to carry around the knowledge of how to write custom CSS in their heads. If they would rather have two columns instead of one, they can do that by themselves. If they don’t like the color of the background anymore, they can change it by themselves. If they’d prefer a different body copy font, or the sidebar headings just aren’t making them feel happy, they can change all that themselves.

My clients not needing my help all the time = awesome (and less expensive for them).
My time being spent on other projects = awesome (and more productive for me).

REASON NUMBER THREE: SEO awesomeness in every copy of Thesis

Thesis comes with numerous options (which show up in your Wordpress dashboard) for configuring your meta keywords and meta description. You know, the stuff that Google sees when it looks at your website – which is the stuff that (hopefully) your target market is looking for online.

Not only that, but the way that Thesis’ native layout works is a beautiful thing, and search engines love it because it makes sense to them. They don’t see the pretty design – they see the bones of the site, and Thesis has beautiful, logical bones. (I am a huge fan of logic, which is probably an additional reason I love Thesis so much.)

REASON NUMBER FOUR: Thesis makes menu creation ridiculously fun

Normally, when you have multiple pages in your Wordpress website – but you don’t want every single page showing up in your menu navigation – it takes some time and custom php to call the right pages (or exclude the ones you don’t want).

Thesis makes this damn easy by letting you not only checkbox which pages to include in your navigation, but also letting you rename them or drag them into a different order. (Yes, I’m swearing now, because Thesis is JUST THAT AWESOME.)

REASON NUMBER FIVE: a huge Thesis user community means tons of great tutorials

Thesis has a giant forum dedicated to the installation, implementation, and customization of the Thesis theme – and even if you never post a question, you will more than likely find the solution to whatever technical problem you have.

I have used so many of the Thesis community’s tutorials for different things: that’s how I learned how to switch the navigation placement, how to widgetize the footer, and how to make custom templates that work with Thesis, for starters.

What are you waiting for? You need a copy of Thesis.

You can get a personal license or a developer’s license (you can guess which one I use, heh), depending on what you need. And if you’re a client of mine – I can include your copy in the project cost, and it’ll be cheaper that way too.

Happy coding!