Why use the WordPress Thesis Theme?

Ten Reasons To Choose Thesis as Your WordPress Theme

Thesis is not just any theme, it is a Theme Customization Framework. It has been designed to make it much easier to style WordPress to make your site look the way you want, and also to customize WordPress to add the features you want.

1. Good SEO Support – Title Tags and Descriptions

Thesis encourage you to supply Title, Meta Descriptions and Keywords in custom fields when you edit your post. It also allow you to index certain summary pages and hence address the risk of duplicate content. It also makes Feedburner integration the inclusion of Google Analytics straightforward.

2. Easy To Customize The Layout

Thesis Design Options allow you choose the number and size of the sidebars and whether you want the content to the left, center or right of the page. From a SEO standpoint we prefer to have the content first, so normally I have either one or two sidebars on the right hand side.

3. Drop Down Menus

From version 1.6 Thesis has drop down menus so it is easy to build more complex menu structures. You can also over-type the name that appears in the menu so that it does not necessarily have to be the same as the page title. This is useful as it means you can keep the menu names shorter and the page titles longer and more descriptive which is better from an SEO standpoint

4. Easy To Customize Colors

Thesis recommends you use the custom.css file located in the wp-content/themes/thesis/custom folder to override any colors and supply background images. For example, to change the color of a border on menus add the following line to custom.css:

.custom .menu, .custom .menu a, .custom .menu li ul { border-color: #CCCCCC; }

Note that each element is preceded by the ‘.custom’ class.

5. Teasers

Teasers are displayed on the home page and on the archives pages where you want to display snippets for a number of posts. You can configure the teaser to include a title, author, post date, a post excerpt and a ‘read more’ link. Thesis displays two teasers per row. On the home page you can choose how many posts are displayed in full and how many are displayed as teasers. Typically I go for one or two posts in full followed by the rest as teasers.

Thesis will generate post excerpts automatically. You can also supply thumbnail images when you edit the post which Thesis will then use to create the excerpt. Also If you have no thumbnail Thesis can generate one automatically from an image that you associate with the post. If you want more control you can of course specify the entire post except text and image yourself.

6. Multimedia Box

The Multimedia Box provides an easy way to introduce visual interest to the site. The simplest approach is to ‘use’ the rotator facility which cause images in the ‘custom/rotator’ folder to be chosen randomly and displayed each time a page on the site is displayed. You can override this default behaviour by supplying a specific image to display when you specify a post.

More useful is the ability to embed video in the multimedia box. This is particularly useful if you want to shoot a short video of yourself supplying more information that is related to your article.

More sophisticated still to include custom code in the Multimedia Box. With this you can add more sophisticated items such as tabbed menus.

7. Feature Box

The feature box is like another multimedia box but placed more prominently across the top of the page. Its typical uses are featuring posts or highlighting a special offer. Given the size and position of the feature box it is where you want to put the post important marketing messages for your clients. Right now in Thesis 1.6 it is programmed by PHP but I expect later versions of Thesis to make this more of a point and click experience.

8. Hooks To Add Your Customizations

Thesis is highly customizable though its ‘hooks’. At a hook you can include a custom function which takes some action such as insert some HTML. The full list of hooks is found at the Thesis Hook Reference. For example, if I wanted to replace or relocate the navigation bar using my own custom function ‘my_nav_area()’ I would proceed as follows:

remove_action('thesis_hook_before_header', 'thesis_nav_menu');
add_action('thesis_hook_after_footer', 'my_nav_area');


This places the Menu after the footer as far as the code and search engines are concerned. However I can relocate the menu visually to the desired location using CSS. Why am I doing this? It is the first link priority issue. Google only considers only the first link to the same page. So in the first link to my home page I do not want the text in the link to say ‘Home’. Instead I want it to say something like ‘WordPress Expert Solutions Made Easy’ or something of that ilk. So I put the link in the body of my article and then use the above technique to ensure that the ‘home’ navigation link is located after the main page content content in the source code.

9. Easy To Customize and Maintain Those Changes After Upgrades

Thesis is well organized so all you customizations are in one place – in the ‘custom’ folder. Rather than have your changes distributed around various wordpress files, all your code updates are in a single file, custom_functions.php so the whole updating and upgrading process is much easier to manage.
However, because Thesis allows you to do a lot through point and click, there is often not much you need to do, other than tweaking the header and the navigation bar.

10. Support Forums

In addition to DIY Themes support staff, there is also is a busy support forum where you can get help from Thesis veterans. Check the forum first in case you problem has already been solved. Also keep you questions short.

If I had to pick the biggest benefit, it would be number 9, it is all about the ease of customization of Thesis to make it do anything you want, while at the same time, doing most things well enough out of the box.

This far, my own business has around 20 Thesis sites so I am definitely a buyer. It is $87 for a single licence or $164 for a multi-site licence. For me it represents great value. It is much quicker to create a new Thesis skin, by the addition of a few lines in custom.css and custom_functions.php than it is to build a completely new WordPress Theme.

If you would like to buy Thesis then you could use my affiliate link – it does not affect the price you pay. Click Thesis WordPress Theme if you want to thank me financially for this article or click WordPress Thesis if you don’t.

Tagged as: Customization, Themes