Pumping things up with Thesis

As usual, I’m more than a day late and a lot more than a dol­lar short, but I’ve finally man­aged to make a very pos­i­tive change for this blog site.

I know just enough HTML and CSS to get by, but when it comes to try­ing to design and style an entire site?  Fahgitaboutit!  So I am always the one wan­der­ing around, try­ing to find a Word­Press theme I like.  And if you have your own blog, you know the pit­falls asso­ci­ated with try­ing to find the ‘per­fect’ theme.  You find a theme that you like most of, but there are always those one or two areas that don’t look quite right or don’t func­tion quite right.  So you let the pos­i­tive aspects of the theme try to out­weigh the neg­a­tive aspects and before long, you’re out look­ing for a new theme again.  And if you’re like me, the process has repeated itself sev­eral times.

With my Scots blood, I admit to being fru­gal.  So I was always look­ing for a free theme that would do every­thing I wanted it to do for my site.  I sus­pect you’re nod­ding your head about now, as you rec­og­nize a bit of your­self in that admission.

After spend­ing a bit more time look­ing for free per­fec­tion than most peo­ple might spend, I finally decided it was time to throw in the towel and spend a bit of money.  I wanted a very plain, sim­ple and fun­da­men­tal style that was going to be search engine opti­mized.  I didn’t think that was going to be too tough a bill to fill, but it turns out you can get a lot of sharp-looking themes or a lot of SEO’ed themes, but try­ing to get both in the same pack­age was prov­ing a bit difficult.

And then, I dis­cov­ered The­sis, designed by DIYThemes.  A pal of mine, Matt Mecham, uses The­sis on his own site and he has really accom­plished the look I wanted for this site.  But I didn’t nec­es­sar­ily want a theme that looked just like Matt’s, so I kept look­ing.  How­ever, I kept com­ing back to admire that simply-stated ele­gance of Matt’s site.

I decided to look a bit deeper into The­sis and found I am very much a late-comer to this excel­lent bit of code.  And notice how I sud­denly stopped refer­ring to The­sis as a theme and started call­ing it ‘code’?  Relax for a moment and watch this video -

Sud­denly, you can see The­sis is a lot more than just a theme.  The ease with which The­sis can be cus­tomized is amaz­ing.  Even if you don’t have any expe­ri­ence in cod­ing any design changes, with a few clicks of a mouse you can eas­ily per­son­al­ize your site.  Want a dif­fer­ent font?  In a cou­ple of mouse clicks, you’ve got what you want.  Want to change the color of a link?  Click, click and you’re finished.

I installed The­sis on the server, same as any other theme.  After about 25–30 min­utes, I had mod­i­fied some col­ors and some text styles to get the look I wanted to have for my site.  The­sis has its own con­trol pan­els, within the Word­Press con­trol panel and every­thing is laid out in a very intu­itive man­ner.  After a few min­utes, you can be maneu­ver­ing around like a real pro.

And by using The­sis, I was also able to remove some plu­g­ins from the site.  Any time I can remove weight from the server, I am all for it.  No more need for a plu­gin to add my Ana­lyt­ics code, that is imple­mented within The­sis.  No longer any need for an SEO plu­gin, that is also already part of Thesis.

I’m sure there will be indi­vid­u­als turned off by the The­sis price tag, but after just one day of using it, I can say The­sis is well-worth it.  It’s not very often I get excited by a new prod­uct pur­chase, but I am def­i­nitely happy the be a new The­sis customer!

If any of you are inter­ested in using The­sis on your own blogs, but are a lit­tle unsure about how to install it, I have a deal for you.  Click on the The­sis image in this blog post, or the The­sis ad in the side­bar.  Pur­chase The­sis using my affil­i­ate link and I will install it for you at no charge.  (Just be sure to clear your browser’s his­tory before click­ing on my affil­i­ate links.)  If you have ques­tions about how to accom­plish cer­tain things in The­sis, they offer a very friendly and infor­ma­tive customer-only forum.  And I will be happy to help you with any ques­tions you may have, as well.

And now, I am back to enjoy­ing my Thesis-powered blog site!

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