Jason Preston
Writing

Why I use the premium Thesis Theme for WordPress

Jason Preston · 6 min read ·

Disclaimer: I am a member of the Thesis affiliate program, which means that if you follow one of my links and buy Thesis, I will love you forever (and make about $20). I’d like to think that my rave reviews are unaffected by this fact, but that’s for you to decide.

[Image removed]As part of my work, I design, build, and configure custom WordPress installations for clients who are looking to start blogging. This means digging into PHP files and gutting CSS stylesheets so that I end up with just the right combination of colors, fonts, and images.

What in the world am I doing buying and using a premium WordPress theme?

There’s a reason that out-of-the-box solutions work: they work out-of-the-box. Thesis is the only real out-of-the-box solution for WordPress. As an added bonus, it is the most flexible, beautiful, and well constructed theme I have ever used.

Here are three reasons why you should consider using Thesis yourself.

Clean, search-optimized code that just works

How many times have you forgotten to check to see if your site works in Internet Explorer 6? Safari? Opera?

How many of you actually know how to use multiple stylesheets to ensure browser compatibilty?

How many of you don’t have a clue what that even means?

Fortunately, Thesis works beautifully with every browser on the market (and looks decent on mobile phones, too), without having to do anything to it. I’ve seen a lot of PHP and CSS in the last couple of years, and Chris Pearson’s work is absolutely stunning.

You don’t have to spend time worrying about the technical details of building a site. By default your title tags, link structure, and page templates are configured for maximum SEO oomph.

I started using Thesis months ago when it first came out (and cost only $67---now it’s a whopping, showstopping, bank-busting $87). It’s gone through a number of revisions since then and every time it gets better and better.

For those of you who, like me, enjoy tinkering, the theme---actually Chris calls it a framework---comes with a custom stylesheet and a custom functions PHP file that make customizing the CSS and PHP a snap, and preserves your customizations when you upgrade to a newer version of the theme.

In essence, you’re getting the best of both worlds. A gorgeous, hands-off, pre-packaged theme with an eight-cylinder engine under the hood.

Professional styling built in to the theme

I am a big proponent of making the internet look better. I think most sites have been hit repeatedly with the ugly treebranch until they’ve become unusable. A pleasant user experience is hard to find.

So it should come as no surprise that I absolutely love what Thesis does to make life easier on the eyes.

“Thesis supports pull quotes”

Did you notice the disclaimer at the top of this post? That gray box can be called into being simply by wrapping <p class="note"></p> around a paragraph in the WordPress write tab.

Similarly, the drop cap at the beginning of this post is pre-programmed into the theme. Just wrap your drop cap letter in <span class="drop_cap"></span>.

There’s also a handy-dandy alert box.

Images align properly based on the selection you make in the WordPress image uploader, and it’s a snap to put a nice-looking border around them.

Basically it’s getting hard to find excuses for ugliness.

Thesis comes equipped with an options panel that lets you pick the number of columns you want and set the font and size of all the text on your site, from the body copy to all different headlines, without changing a line of code. You simply pick one of 26 fonts from a drop-down box:

[Image removed — original hosted on WordPress]

I think I actually cackled when I saw this for the first time. This is why Jason-Preston.com and Eat Sleep Publish and Web Community Forum can all look so different while running the same theme.

Amazingly, this list includes choices such as Calibri and Constantia, which you typography/web geeks well know are not on the short list of two or three fonts that are available in all browsers.

Instead of relying on the client, Pearson uses CSS to push those fonts to people who don’t already have them installed.

So easy your grandma could do it

This is my favorite part of all. I’ve purchased and worked with a number of premium WordPress themes before, as well as a whole slew of free ones, and mucking about in someone else’s theme (even the “professional” ones) is never a pleasant experience.

Usually the pretty demo sites feature complicated custom keys and weird CSS hacks that are a nightmare to manage and nearly impossible to customize.

In contrast, using Thesis is so braindead simple that your grandma could do it. Here’s a partial list of things you can currently do with two clicks of the mouse in the WordPress back end:

  • Choose between 26 fonts for your site

  • Individually select fonts and sizes for the Header, Titles, h3s, etc

  • Choose between 1, 2, and 3-column layouts

  • Choose the size of those columns

  • Customize the byline on your posts

  • Choose whether to display the media box in the sidebar or not

  • Choose whether to show images, video, or custom code in the media box

  • Pick which pages you want to appear in your top navigation bar

  • Link to custom URLs in the top navigation bar

Not only can you implement basic changes without getting into the code at all, using this theme essentially makes your site future-proof, because Chris is going to keep developing Thesis as changes continue to happen in WordPress and in search engine algorithms.

Downsides

Surely there are some downsides here? No product is perfect, and Thesis is unfortunately not an exception to that rule.

My Grandmother loves to say that when you have a guest room at your house, you need to spend at least one night in it before you offer it to guests, because that’s the only way you’re going to discover those little things (like a missing soap dish) that will embarrass you later when you have an actual guest.

A WordPress theme is pretty similar - you need to really use it before you figure out what it can’t do. So far, there are only a few things that I really wish weren’t missing:

  1. The “edit” link for individual posts when you’re logged in as the admin. I rely on this link all the time to edit posts on the fly when I see is poorly aligned image or a misspelled word. Frankly, this is pretty easy to add and I’m just lazy so I haven’t yet.

  2. Individual CSS styling on page tabs isn’t possible. The first version of Thesis let you do cool things to the navigation menu (like color one menu item green, or point one of them for a category page), and use custom CSS to make sure it all looked pretty. Can’t do that anymore. Annoying as hell.

  3. Disappearing favicons - when I moved Eat Sleep Publish to Thesis, I also lost my Favicon for a while, which happens because the metadata isn’t pre-set up in the header.php file. Actually I think it probably broke because I did something weird to my favicon file - most browsers should find the file automatically nowadays.

Oh, and I almost forgot one thing:

Support

Chris spends a lot of time writing up beautiful explanations on how to use each feature in the theme. The explanations are well thought out, visual, and easy to follow.

Beyond that, there is a support community that is both helpful and responsive. I’ve relied on the forums a couple of times and, in several cases, received answers from Pearson himself, who regularly cruises the boards helping out his customers.

So what are you waiting for? Go buy it now.