I (and I am not the only one!) spend a lot of time – WASTE a lot of time – mucking around with Wordpress Themes.
So far I reckon I’ve spent $500 on Headway (Developer), Frugal (Developer), Thesis (Developer), Obox. And NOW I am thinking about Woo Themes for shredquest.com as Obox’s Press and Through the Lense just don’t cut the mustard (bye-bye, $70USD).
So here’s my take on this. Lots of cats reckon this is a Thesis vs Headway vs Frugal vs Whatever debate. It’s not. This is about finding a theme that is “good enough” for you to get your ideas across. For a photographer, this might be something like the free Autofocus. For a Presser you might want Obox’s Press theme.
What I find about guys like Obox and WooThemes, is that whilst they make some nice themes, they’re purely that – nice themes. I always find I’ll buy them but they’ll be not-quite-right for me. Obox’s Through the Lense theme? GREAT! Except the comments take up 60% of a post’s page width. WTF, right? I want those suckers down the bottom of the page.
Facebook integration? Not so easy.
It’s why, although I get lured by the shiny layout of these pages, I realise that the framework-type themes (Thesis, Frugal, Headway) are what you really want. Why? They’re really good for content management, AND, you can always get a page layout mocked up and then coded cheap on elance.com. That’s what I do.
So, your key considerations are:
- Do you need something favouring substance over style? Where it’s potential sameness with other blogs could be completely irrelevant to readers? Yep? Then get Thesis, Headway or Frugal. I mean Darren at Problogger runs his site on Frugal. ‘Nuff said! Thesis in particular does not have a steep learning curve and is easy to use. I find it lacks the flexibility of Frugal and Headway though. Thesis handles Facebook Connect and comments very well.
- Do you need something that ABSOLUTELY KICKS ARSE? Then get someone like Lauren at Creative Curio to really personalise your site. It’s what I am doing for wherespresso.com. A bog standard Wordpress theme, even if it’s paid for, will NEVER do everything you want.
Summary?
Pay for something that gives you 95% of what you want, and save a bucket of money by getting Headway, Frugal or Thesis “skinned”.
Pay someone nothing (or a small amount) and get a generic theme that will do probably 50-80% of what you need, then bug the shit out of you because it doesn’t do the remaining stuff (which I promise you will turn out to be really important and therefore super annoying).
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