WooThemes & Why I No Longer Use Thesis

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I was a long-time Thesis WordPress theme user on my blog. For almost three years I proudly claimed it as my preferred blogging theme of choice.

However, I found myself wanting change, but I wasn't in the mood for an extensive redesign.

Now, don't get me wrong. Thesis is a very flexible theme and probably the best when it comes to making design updates without wading through lines of code.

In fact, I was planning on installing a fresh version of Thesis on my local version of WordPress and redesigning from scratch.

Hello WooThemes!

Then I stumbled upon the WooThemes Headlines theme and it just happend to have everything I wanted...

- A place for a banner in the header

- A clean layout

- A combined Latest/Popular/Comment Sidebar Widget

It even has some features I never thought of using before such as the animated featured post widget on the homepage, dynamic thumbnail images and more.

So I concluded I would have to do much less customizing if I used WooThemes instead of starting over with Thesis.

So my decision to switch was less about me not liking Thesis and more about finding a theme that already has many of the features and style I desired.

Is There Anything Not to Like About WooThemes?

Of course, there are always things you're not going to like about most themes. And actually most of the things I don't like about WooThemes have more to do with things I miss from using Thesis.

As I've already mentioned, I don't think any theme does as good a job of letting you update certain sitewide features with ease.

Thesis installs a Design and Site Options panel into your WordPress admin area and allows you to update things like the colors of your main menu, font sizes, font type, width of columns, byline data (or remove it altogether) and the list goes on.

I found myself having to edit the style.css file directly to make certain customizations with WooThemes and that typically goes with most WordPress themes. So Thesis definitely wins the customization battle.

After using Thesis for so long, it's easy to forget how much of the backend work it was doing for me so thumbs up for that!

Fortunately for me, I've got a bit of a background with CSS so this wasn't a huge issue.

I'll Stick With WooThemes for Now

I'm pretty happy with WooThemes. Despite the features I miss from Thesis, I'm much happier with the overall design on my blog now.

The great thing about owning Thesis is you get a lifetime of free updates. So when 2.0 rolls out, I'll still get to check it out. After all, nothing really beats the Thesis design options.

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