Here you will find products, services and step-by-step processes that will cut through the jargon and help you to grow a profitable Internet Marketing business.
Contact me if you have any questions. Or explore the site through the search box or links in the sidebars to the right. To your success!
Thesis
Full disclosure: I’m an affiliate for Thesis, as well as a user.
I’ve used the Thesis framework on this, and all my WordPress sites, for a couple of years now.
You’ll see that I refer to Thesis as a framework, not a theme.
That’s because it works differently from the established perception of a WordPress theme.
The reason I use Thesis is not because of its styling or design – those are both extremely minimalistic out of the box.
I use it because it’s a platform that enables me to unlock the power of WordPress without having to get into, and tinker with, the core code and without having to add a gazillion plugins.
In fact, as a result of Thesis’ functionality, I’ve been able to reduce the number of plugins I was originally using on this site by more than 30%.
The strength of Thesis, then, lies in two areas:
- The quality of its underlying code
- The power it gives you to configure your WordPress site
The quality and efficiency of the underlying code
WordPress is often accused of being slow to load.
Some of that is due to the fact that it’s based on PHP, which means that it makes multiple calls to the server during the load process. It’s not just a one shot deal (unless you have one of the cache plugins installed).
But a lot of it is due to poorly, inefficiently coded themes. These also have to be PHP based to work with WordPress and, if they’re poorly coded, they’ll make more calls to the server than necessary, slowing down load times.
In two previous releases of Thesis (1.5 and 1.7) they re-organised the underlying code and, in both cases, site load times improved noticeably.
The Power to Configure Your WordPress Site
The second factor is the way Thesis enables me to completely alter the layout of my WordPress sites.
The most recent release (1.7 at the time of writing) introduced very focused controls over the SEO features of your WordPress site, on both a site-wide basis and post-by-post.
I can also structure items like my menu (navigation bar) and site layout (number and positioning of columns, full width or page style, etc) quickly and easily without getting into the WordPress core code.
All that said, you’ll hear a lot of moaning about Thesis.
It’s absolutely true to say that Thesis does involve a learning curve, which can be frustrating and time-consuming at first.
But, in my view, time invested in learning Thesis will be repaid with interest in terms of your site performance.
Here are some articles and reviews I’ve written about Thesis in particular, and use of themes in general:
Review of the Thesis OpenHook Plugin.
An article questioning why you would want to develop your own theme from scratch.
An article on how your WordPress theme can affect your site’s performance in the search results.
I’m so convinced that installing and using Thesis on your WordPress site will bring you huge benefits in terms of your site’s performance and your ability to achieve a design you love, that I’m currently running a special offer.
If you have any questions please contact me – I’d be delighted to offer any thoughts or suggestions I can!
Cheers,
