We knew from the beginning that we wanted to customize a theme for the Lifestreambackup blog. But we didn’t want to build one from scratch, so we spent a lot of time looking at various themes and some Wordpress systems that have moved far beyond mere themes to figure out what made the most sense for our situation. We ended up choosing Chris Pearson’s Thesis Theme and, for those of you who may be considering Thesis (or some other theme) I thought it may be helpful to explain why.
Reason #1 – It saves time. We are up to our ears in feature requests for our product, which is awesome, but it also means that we don’t have time to spend an hour tweaking our blog CSS every time we want to do something a bit different. You know the drill – you dig through the file and change 5 things, reload the page, decide you don’t like it, then change them back. Sometimes you accidentally change the wrong thing (if, like me, you aren’t a CSS guru) and then your whole blog is screwed up.
Thesis makes it easy enough that even a Wall Street banker could figure it out. Tweak a few drop down menus, hit save, and it’s done.
Reason #2 – It is extremely flexible.. Have you ever added one of those themes to your blog that broke when you decided to try to make it 2 column instead of 3? You won’t get that with Thesis. Whatever layout you want takes about 20 seconds to configure. And if you want to change the header (like we did), it’s a piece of cake.
Reason #3 – SEO This may be the most important reason we chose Thesis. Since we sell an online service, most of our customers find us through blogs and search engines. We wanted a theme that was strong on SEO, and Thesis is the best I have seen. Each post has the option to add custom page titles, keywords, and other things that will make sure you get found on the web. And if you don’t believe me, notice that our post about flickr backup is already on the front page of Google for the search term “flickr backup.” And this blog is just a few months old.
Reason #4 – It’s Cheap Seriously. Chris is undercharging for a theme with so much functionality. If time is money, Thesis has probably saved me at least $500.
Reason #5 – Because Chris Pearson won’t build crap. Chris used to live here in Louisville and while we didn’t hang out together, we did see each other occasionally at business and technology related events. I’ve talked to Chris a lot about technology and about Wordpress in particular, and he’s obsessive to a fault about everything that he does. He is one of those people who sees his work as an extension of himself, and as a result, he won’t put out crap. So I know Thesis will always be rock solid and that if there is a bug, Chris won’t sleep until he finds it.
Taking that all into account, Thesis seemed to be the best theme (if you can call it a theme) for the job. If you are in the market for a Wordpress theme, I encourage you to consider Thesis. And if you need to backup your Wordpress blog, I encourage you to try Lifestreambackup for free.
