Note: Headway 3.0 is coming soon, and when it does, it’s going to cost more dough. If you get it before 3.0 ships, you can upgrade for free and not have to pay for annual support. Check out the Headway 3.0 Teaser Video.
What’s Headway?
This blog post took me 2 hours to outline and write. It should, hopefully, take you considerably less time than that to read.
The Twittersphere has been all abuzz over the debut of the only serious competitor to the Thesis Theme for WordPress last week. It’s the Headway Theme, presented by Grant Griffith’s G2 Web Media and developed by his son, co-owner Clay Griffiths. Since there’s a lot of press out there on Thesis already, and I myself have written a rather comprehensive article on why Thesis is the bomb, I won’t reiterate the basics of Thesis here.
Naturally, since I have a strong client base of legal professionals, and Grant Griffiths’ products are well-known and respected in that community, I’m hearing from clients about Headway. It’s already gaining a strong foothold among the lawyer set.
Disclaimer: This comparison is not intended to be a “yellow team” vs. “blue team” shoot-out, although readers are free to fight it out in the comments (be nice). Any of my small gripes about Headway are not in order to protect any sort of serious Thesis affiliate income – I’ve made less than $600 in commissions on Thesis over the past seven months. Either I’m the world’s lousiest affiliate marketer, or I’ve just been too busy building Thesis websites to push that avenue. This post is long, because I personally hate short, very general posts that are just intended to get you there so you might click the affiliate link. I’m here to actually give you some information. Suck it up.
How the Comparison was Done
As a test of how Headway can be customized, I decided to try to recreate the home page from my own Rowboat Media website (if you’re not in an RSS reader or email – you’re here). It’s on a Thesis full-width framework and really isn’t heavily customized at ALL – it’s still very discernably Thesis. My Headway “clone” is here. Explanation of the three basic pages on that site – Home, About, and Blog – follows.
While it may be obvious that Headway’s quickly-becoming-famous drag-and-drop layout editor is a boon to non-designers willing to operate within its constraints, I took a designer’s perspective. I often work with a specific end in mind and need to see if a framework can be bent to my will – without modifying core files, which is a rule I absolutely refuse to break. I don’t need clients screaming at me that they updated WordPress or their theme and broke their design.
To create my home page, I first went into the Headway Design panel and handled all of the options there. A more detailed blog post with screenshots of the Headway Dashboard may be forthcoming, but I’m trying to stay high-level here. The Stylesheet section is important to designers – you can choose the Headway Default style sheet or a couple of bare bones stylesheets, which are recommended for designers. I was curious about what I could accomplish without having to resort to my own code, so I stuck with the Default and springboarded off of that. I also activated the custom.css stylesheet, which became quite necessary later.
I uploaded my header graphic and was presented with the option of “inside wrapper” or “outside wrapper”. I guessed that for a full-width look, I needed to choose “outside wrapper.” I was right, and choosing a matching header background color gave me the look I wanted, and the behavior of the navigation menu seemed tied to that choice as well.
Then I went through the choices for colors, typography and font sizes and filled in all of the relevant fields with colors and fonts to match my original site (more on that later, in the Gripes section.)
Finally, I went to the Layout Editor – instead of choosing from a set series of column layout choices like those Thesis offers, I was given the option to enter pixel dimensions or drag and drop to create my layout. I created a content area, a rotating image leaf (to correspond to Thesis’ multimedia box) and two sidebar leafs/leaves (guess what those matched up with?).
After that I went to create a footer that matched my existing full-width footer. No dice with that – see Gripes, after viewing the NOT-full-width footer on the clone site.
The About Page – in Which I Grok the Layout Editor.
Once I had styled my home page as far as I could go to match my original without modifying core files, I decided to have some fun with the Layout Editor in the About page. And in five groggy minutes after midnight, I accomplished what you see there. A top content layer (the default WordPress-issued text) and three columns underneath. In five minutes, with the drag-and-drop editor, and using some of their “canned” functionality. For instance, the About leaf lets you write your blurb, upload a photo, and include a “Read More” link for a deeper read – I can see this fitting perfectly in any blogger’s home page sidebar. The Twitter leaf is self-explanatory, and the Recent Posts – nothing to write home about.
What’s exciting is this. I did in five minutes with Headway what would have possibly taken hours to do in Thesis without pre-canned code, using hooks, functions, a calculator, PHP and CSS and lots of head-banging looking for the inevitably misplaced semicolon. Newbies think this is way cool. As a designer, I know the pain intimately, because I do things every day that non-technical WordPress users won’t even attempt.
Note, of course, that this layout is completely different than the one in the home page. Without writing a single function or conditional statement. I just did a big project with custom page templates in Thesis, so I bow down before this functionality.
And, let’s face it – the page-width content or graphics area with 3 columns centered below it is highly trendy right now, which means clients are going to ask for it. I myself am starting to see it as the look of “2009 design.” Heck, check out Headway’s own home page above the fold (wicked grin). Two years after the avant garde design community was saying rounded corner designs were so OVER, we’re still doing them for clients. Of course, who are these people who get to declare trends over, anyway?
I left the blog completely untouched on purpose – therefore you can see the Headway “instruction panel” that you’re supposed to delete, and the default sidebar that comes with the blog page. This sidebar is the one called the “primary sidebar” in the Widgets panel. Obviously you can do with your blog all of the things you can do with any of the other pages in Headway, so I felt safe to stop here.
Headway Gripes
You knew this was coming, didn’t you? Before you all rush over to port side to buy Headway instead of Thesis and capsize this here blog post, keep reading. You only have two more sections to go, I promise. Stop. Whining.
I compiled a detailed list of every single thing that gave me heartburn, and emailed it to the owners of Headway. They responded personally, thanked me for my list, and told me many of the things on it will be addressed in v1.5, which is currently in development.
Here they are:
Typography: In my Why Thesis? article, I wax poetic about Pearson’s mastery of typography. Headway’s got a way to go here. There are less than half the font choices in the design menu, and the line height defaults to 1.75, which looked super-crappy on my site. I went over to my real site and grabbed Chris’s magical calculated value from there, and I had to use custom.css to style my elements in Trebuchet MS, a disgustingly common font. This slowed me down considerably. Type sizes don’t match up either – 13 pt Arial in Thesis had to be sized down to 11 pt in Headway to look the same. Here is one area where I had to get into code more with Headway than with Thesis.
Footer: There’s no elegant way to pull off a full-width footer in Headway without modifying core files, which I refuse to do. Ditto for those default links. Clay assures me this is coming soon.
Image rotator: The image rotator is really cool, in that it produces a built-in slideshow of up to 4 images per page, and you can control speed and transition. I liked the static randomizer in Thesis, though, as I hate flashy things when I’m trying to read something. Also – in Thesis, images are auto-sized to fit perfectly into the multimedia box (provided you stay within a long list of common aspect ratios). The same images were not auto-sized in Headway, and I found I had to do a certain amount of tinkering around with the size and never did get the hairline border to look right before I declared it too time consuming and moved on to other things.
Location of custom.css file: I clocked this whole experiment at 5 and a half hours. This would have been considerably LESS had the custom.css file belonged in the Custom folder along with its cousin, custom_functions.php. However, it doesn’t – Headway stores it in the Headway root folder. My Thesis-trained FTP brain never could remember this, and there was much cursing when my site seemed to be ignoring my CSS. I kept either dropping it in the Custom folder, or the site root folder. This may say more about me than Headway. Someone moved my cheese.
Sidebars: Sidebars/Leafs don’t show up in the widget panel with unique names (like Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2) unless you assign them, which took me a minute to figure out. It also took me a minute to figure out what the heck a Primary Sidebar was (it’s the default-issue with the blog page).
Which do I buy? Headway or Thesis?
The only answer I can give, even though I know major goodness is coming down the pike for both products, is based in the here and now. It depends on what is important to you. If you are a DIY blogger and you want to get your paws on that Layout Editor above all else and get a site launched by the end of this month, go with Headway. It’s looking to be a good product for a v1.0, and I’m certainly going to keep following it, kicking its tires, and developing on it because my clients demand it.
However, Thesis has proven itself over the past year to be a stability and SEO powerhouse (which Headway has not yet had a chance to prove), and has a large community with a rich supply of information already out there. The forums are active and well-populated with skilled designers, whereas Headway’s support forum is just getting off the ground, and the demographic in the forums so far isn’t asking the really hard questions to draw out the complex answers. There are many good designers with hundreds of hours of Thesis design time under their belts, including yours truly.
On the other hand, a lot of the complex questions asked and answered about Thesis just aren’t that complex any more with Headway’s Layout Editor. I have no doubt that Pearson has something spectacular up his sleeve for Thesis 2.0, however, and these two developers may be leapfrogging each other for quite some time. Once Thesis 2.0 is released, I know it will be elegant and stable because everything else has been to date. Both frameworks offer lifetime upgrades with purchase of a license, so I wouldn’t go diving from one side of the fence to the other (or experiencing buyer’s remorse) just yet. I think the fourth quarter of this year could turn out to be extremely interesting where both products are concerned.
Bottom line: If you already own and like Thesis, I’d sit tight for a month or two and see what happens in terms of functionality. If you don’t own either one and are trying to make a decision, use the information above and my Why Thesis? article to help you.
As a designer with a varied range of clients to serve, I’m casting my vote in both places and adding both to my toolbox, and the Headway banner gets an honored place in my sidebar alongside Thesis.
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@Sheila – thanks for the list, because now the Headway folks can respond more specifically – I always think it’s a good idea if you have something negative to say to be as precise with it as possible.
I don’t feel qualified to address the items myself, so I shall recuse myself and stand back.
@ Sheila. There are a host of forum posts (and answers) to your queries. Have you checked the documentation pages as well, as this answers the majority of your questions. But, just an FYI on some:
1) Check you have the latest version, Clay amended the intelligent coding on 1.5 to load quicker (and all areas do save, though this hasn’t been an issue for me).
2) See above re. saving.
3) As I mentioned, check the latest download, some versions of 1.5 shipped with a Header upload quirk, but that’s been resolved.
4) That’s correct, as it’s a Text leaf – if it was an Image Rotator it’d be different. And again, there are answers to this in the forums.
5) You simply remove it via the Footer option on your Visual Editor. Simple.
6) There is a huge amount of documentation, not sure where you see “marginal” versions.
Kudos to Cynthia for having this open discussion, but if you’re looking for answers and help, where better than the forums and community that’s set up for that? After all, that’s how everyone else benefits from the answers…
PS – Cynthia, no, I just had my X-ray vision off for a while…
@Danny – thanks for the info, especially #6 – sounds like a lot of improvements in usability over 1.0 and I look forward to working with it.
The member forums are a great place to keep building a knowledge base on the themes, but if one of them gets called out for “bugs” publicly, I like to see answers given publicly, too!
@Sheila – I hope Danny’s answers are helpful to you in moving forward – you are ALWAYS welcome here, (as is Danny and his swirling superhero cape) and you added a richer layer to the discussion.
@Cynthia – thanks for your warm words of encouragement. I feel a bit intrusive as a newcomer being so vocal. I was quite specific and initially positive on the Headway Forum. The lack of response within 24 hours was distressing. I’m happy to report that Clay has now taken an interest in my thread and so hopefully I’ll be able to go back to v 1.5 again soon.
@Danny – I bought on Thursday morning the 19th and installed v1.5.1 which is what was in my control panel and presumably the most current. If something newer has been released since then I don’t know about it as I was forced to regress to v1 on Friday morning. I had a job to get done. I did, of course, read and search the forums, and found many others with the same issue of not being able to save header images and no answers. In fact this morning there’s another fellow seeing the exact same thing as me. Clay has asked for our log-ins to see what’s going on. So just because you are not having the problem doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that I’m incompetent!
Re: the footer and documentation… I read all of the online manual which is NOT searchable (as far as I can see) and nowhere could I find how to remove the Powered by Headway. The Design Editor Footer option simply allows you to uncheck showing admin. At least that’s my memory. I don’t have 1.5 installed to check it now but that’s how it is in v1 and I’m pretty sure it’s that way in 1.5 as well.
Update: I just installed v1.5.1 on a different site and was able to add the header image. So apparently there’s some conflict with a common plug-in OR some other difference in the two installs. It’s the same script. I also checked and saw exactly where I can custom select what is displayed in teh footer. But again, that wasn’t anywhere I could find in the manual. But I’m increasingly optimistic. Of course now I’ll need to learn how to transfer from one version to the other. Think I’ll put that off awhile!
So here it is end of February, and still no Thesis 2.0. I purchased the developer’s option and won’t rant about it here, but it’s been extremely difficult to work with as a mediocre coder. So I’m looking at Headway. But while Thesis offers a moneyback guarantee, I’m worried that dropping $164 on Headway might be a riskier proposition as there is no equivalent guarantee.
I think the worst part about both of these products is that they hide their support behind a wall, so people aren’t able to see that (in my example) the editor doesn’t work very well in Thesis, etc, and that there seems to be a lot of breathless defending of the Thesis developer as compared to Headway. It sure would have colored my purchase a bit. Plus, how in god’s green earth does one contact Chris at Thesis? “Second to none” support doesn’t mean you throw a post on a community wall and wait for conflicting answers to show up 18 hours later. There is NO contact on DIYThemes homepage. None. Do they only show up when you ask for your money back?
It seems given specifically Sheila’s comments above that many of the same issues with in-browser editors plague both of these products (ironically the “footer removal” issue–I cannot stand shilling for a product I pay for, they should be paying ME–is the same one I am having at Thesis). And I share her qualifier that I am a newbie to Thesis and have NOT used Headway at this point.
I found a pretty good wp solution at ithemes.com (mentioned in the wordpress for dummies book) . It’s called Builder and its a new product, with really great support. Easier than Thesis and with a larger development team behind it than Headway. I would welcome a discussion/comparison of it here.
Hi there Dave,
There’s the full money back guarantee with Headway as there is Thesis. Additionally, if you have any issues with the product, Grant Griffiths (co-founder) actively encourages you to email him publicly via Twitter, etc.
You should find that the dev license for Headway is a little less “restrictive” (for want of a better word), as you’re not held by amount of sites you can use it on (they recently changed, if I’m correct).
Check in with Grant (@GrantGriffiths), I know he’d be more than happy to help
Just want to report that I’ve completed my first extensive site using the newest release of Headway and I’m quite pleased. I have no qualms about recommending them to anyone. I just entered the stream at an awkward time. The site I finished has sections with unique sidebars and sections with no sidebars. It’s at http://www.johnmcmanus-seattle.com.
@Dave: I feel your pain.
. I don’t particularly like it easy, with all the ninjas screaming about yet another “kick-ass site”. But that’s how it’s down these days; I blame Bill Gates for making screaming into an art form 
.
“Breathless defending”: well, yes. Not just Thesis. Headway. StudioPress with its Genesis. I think it’s called “marketing”
Hidden Support. Agreed. A number of themes have specific presales sections in their forum which prospective purchasers can post in, usually just by registering. I think there was a discussion about it here awhiles back, and someone (either from Thesis or Headway) agreed. Haven’t seen it yet in either place. Pity. I think either would do better with a bit less screaming and opening a presale section in their fora.
Overt support. I may be lucky, but when I’ve brought an issue to Chris’s attention (Thesis) or Clay/Grant’s (Headway) they’ve gotten right back to me.
Coding and visual editors. Well, yes again. Developers love Thesis because it’s a very clean, powerful framework. So they do tend to trumpet it as “best”. I’m willing to go under the hood when I have to. But consider this. If I need a magazine-styhle static home page (greeting area, boxes with featured post, featured posts from each category). In Thesis I’ve got to pound out code for #div, style, etc. — with Headway I can drag/drop. For that kind of job, I’ll use Headway, because I’d rather use my time for blogging. But if I want to totally redesign a site ground-up, I might go with thesis, because I’m essentially starting totally from scratch. Right tool for the job in each case.
I have, and use all three. They’re all fine products. I would hate to try to do serious site work w/o all three.
@Darryl: Builder has a LOT of potential and has fine support. A bit too rough around the edges, still. Just the problems with trying to get a header graphic into a child theme. Can be pretty intracable — I had to pound out more php code than I care to think about; support just kept saying to do the obvious things I’d done by reflex (check GD library, permissions, directory structure, hosting service). Life’s too short.
%%robert
Always interested to see more discussion here, and thanks to Darryl for the note on the Builder theme – I’ll have to go check it out.
@DaveR – Headway will let you buy just a one-site license if you want, for $87 and try it out – then if you want to upgrade to the Dev License you can always pay the $77 difference. I know this works because I did it that way myself.
You are not the first nor the only person to complain about support only being for those who purchase – but since both of these themes are run by small shops, I think you can understand that they’d rather offer a money back guarantee instead of maintaining the staff to answer questions from people who are just looking (if their product was $870 instead of $87, that might be a different expectation). The pre-sale forum is an interesting one.
As I’ve said before, Chris usually keeps close tabs on his Twitter stream (@pearsonified) and so does Grant (Headway) at @grantgriffiths. Also, there are lots of people following the #thesiswp and #headwaywp hashtags if you have general questions.
While I was pounding this out, Robert said a lot of other good stuff – so I’m just going to let him…say it.
@Danny – I was unaware that Headway ever restricted the number of sites on a Dev License – am I understanding that correctly? I know that the Thesis Dev License lets you build as many sites as you like provided YOU own the sites – I can’t build sites for my clients without purchasing a Client Site License or their sending me proof of ownership of a Thesis license, but I can build as many of my own as I want.
From my understanding of the new announcement, Headway was the same as Thesis – as many sites as you liked using dev license, as long as they were yours. However, now I believe Headway can be used on as many client sites as well. BUT…. I could be wrong or misunderstood. Let me see if I can get Grant over to confirm
Just checked in with Grant – here’s what he emailed back:
“There is a limit on the personal license. But we removed the $40 for additional sites on the Dev license.”
So yep – buy the Headway Dev license and you can use it on as many sites as you want, both your own and client sites.
Which platform would you say allows you to be more creative and push the boundries of a website.
I see a lot more fun and cool looking sites with thesis then with Headway….
Does Thesis or Headway work better as a CMS?
Justin I see the opposite. If I look at 99% of Thesis sites I see the same boring navigation. Maybe it’s just the choice default of the designer, but it sure is ubiquitous. I don’t see this with Headway.
Hi Justin,
I’m biased (obviously) as a Headway user, but as a Thesis user prior to switching to Headway, I’d say Headway definitely has the edge. The sheer amount of different looks and feel that you can get without the need for coding is immense – add in CSS and you’re a winner.
Not to mention you can have a different look and set up on every single page and posts/categories – they’re two completely different set ups.
@justin
In the last couple of months I think a lot designer/developers have taken on Headway and are pushing the design boundaries, producing sites that are a match for any other framework. Power users and hardcore devs certainly can get a lot out of Headway.
I can’t comment on Thesis (as I chose to trial Headway first), as I have no experience except for watching a couple of demo vids. However, they do look exciting. I do plan to fork out for Thesis when I get some spare cash.
And to anyone from Thesis, the thing that made me try Headway before Thesis was the design of each’s websites.
As CMSes, being WordPress theme frameworks, I’d assume it’s much of a muchness. It’s the plugins, like WP-CMS, that add the real CMS power to WP.
Overall, Thesis is still the more mature product, but I doubt you could go wrong with either Thesis or Headway (or one of their other main competitors).
The world of premium WordPress frameworks is alive and thriving. Which is great for all of us who’ve put our eggs in the WordPress basket.
Hi,
I’d like to change my old HTML-Site (only static pages) into a better designed CMS-site with mainly static appearance again (pages).
Headway has a SEO-tool to manage page titles by settings, but I’d like to give every single page an individual title, description, keywords – like it is at the moment. Is that possible with Headway?
And is there a written documentation beside the one at http://headwaythemes.com/documentation/ ? The fast spoken american english of the videos there is hard to understand for me.
Hi Martin,
The answer to your question is yes – you can give each page its own title, description and keywords with Headway.
I don’t know about written documentation – I do know that John Haydon has provided a lot of Headway tutorials, but many of his are video-based as well.
I sympathize with you trying to understand the spoken English!
Best of luck,
- Cynthia
Thanks for the in-depth comparison.
Speaking from a noobie’s perspective, i’ve just purchased Thesis… must admit i’m a little disappointed with it. Having used wordpress for years, i’ve played around with a bucket load of plugins. I expected Thesis would at least provide customisation options built-in for header images and individual custom page layouts… thus it does not… we’re expected to code up… which i think is a bit rich considering headway does this already.
Another thing… this new release of 2.0 thesis has been discussed as ‘coming soon’ since August of 2009. That’s a long time ago now, with no release date.
Some of the faithful forum members rabbit on about how the designer will ‘do it right, when he’s ready’ .. are you kidding me? I’ve heard of fan boys but that’s ridiculous. We’re the customers, get your s**t together or get off!
It IS true that thesis does look better and the designer has clearly spent a good deal of time with typefaces and layout… it is a pity that thesis needs so much hacking to do what headway already offers with a point and click.
Some people may say ‘headway doesn’t do this or that’ and ‘thesis is the best’ but i’m not buying into such black and white BS. I’m off to try both… the winner, i’ll stick with. The looser gives me a refund
I’m not being rude, that’s just business. This is a business, right folks ?
Anthony, it will be interesting to read about your final choice between either Thesis or Headway.
I can’t speak for Thesis, but it certainly looks very appealing.
Headway, I’ve used for a few months and really only chose it over Thesis because of their catchy Apple-esque video and their own site design.
I couldn’t afford to buy both and try (evening knowing there’s a refund).
Headway’s goal is to make site design easy for those that don’t know much, but my experience is most of those folks want more than their own capabilities can deliver, which requires getting into custom CSS.
I think Headway and Thesis are both great at cookie-cutter websites. However, both require a bit more oompf to get something closer to unique.
I do work on the Headway forums as a moderator, and can assure that Headway is always looking for ways to make that gap between novice and unique more bridgeable. (And one way will be improving the documentation for newbies.)
And I imagine Thesis is doing the same.
I can’t recommend Headway over Thesis, because that would be unfair as I have no experience of Thesis.
But I can recommend Headway as a top notch WordPress theme framework, that is generally easy to use and yet quite powerful “below the hood”.
@Chris
Do you know, if there is a better (written) documentation than the videos at http://headwaythemes.com/documentation/ ?
Anyone here knows about the code quality of headway? A lot of “drag and drop” doesn’t point to a slim and easy code which Google should like – but I’m not an coding expert.
I am very glad to see such information which I was searching for a long time. This made very glad. This site has given us an useful information..
Cynthia, thanks so much for this very detailed article. I’m just at the start of learning WordPress, and plan to use it as a CMS for building lawyer websites. Just this morning learned about “frameworks”, and was having a tough time making heads or tails as to how they fit in with WP and what bit I know about theme customization. Your article made all the puzzle pieces come together. Thanks a bunch!
@Grace – glad you found it helpful overall! The frameworks have both been updated significantly since then – Headway is on 1.6.2 or something and Thesis is on 1.7.
I am sooo confused what theme to buy for my business website, but leaning towards Headway
Thanks for the great review – even if its a year or more old, it brings up good things to look for when comparing frameworks. The follow-up comments have been VERY instructive as well, as they update the information in the original post.
I had originally be deciding between thesis and iTheme’s builder, but now i’m looking at headway, too, so in that sense you’ve just made more work for me. *sigh* I guess its good to have options, tho – as someone brought up, if i’m putting all my eggs in the Wordpress basket, I shouldn’t limit myself further with going with just a single template add-on.
Thanks again!
I favorite Thesis at the moment mostly because of SEO benefit, but truth to be told I like more Headway template modification system. Let me tell you I’m not Web Design guru, actually I’m not noob neater but I want to spend less time dealing with site template and design and put more effort to my site promotion and content, the only reason I didn’t switch to headway it’s because I’m expecting Thesis 2 to rais up soon. Hopefully.
Best Regards
James
Hi All
Bit of a gap between the last comment and this, but what the hey…
Speaking as both a Thesis and Headway user, right now (end 2011) it’s a no-brainer, go with Headway.
I’ve been waiting forever for Thesis 2.0 and heard nothing, no teasers, no hints…. pretty sure it’s not coming at all.
Any new site in the past year i’ve done with Headway and mostly enjoyed the experience, obviously the big attraction being the visual editor. So much more intuitive than fiddling about in Thesis.
My only slight concern is that i have started a site with Headway 3.0 and so far it seems as though they have ‘dumbed’ it down too far in an attempt to make it more appealing to beginners. A number of the features I used a lot have disappeared apparently replaced by a ‘one size fits all’ approach (precise resize anyone?).
Wow…the thread that wouldn’t die! @elsubsta I wouldn’t say HT3 is “dumbed down”. If anything I think they’ve made it way complicated and less easy for novices. But time will tell. They’ve admittedly launched prematurely and are scrambling to squash bugs and add back in missed features. I have about 20 sites in HT2 and have been very happy with it. I’m gearing up to start using 3. They’re supposed to have an upgrade path ready in the next few weeks as they plan to stop supporting v2 on Feb 1. I expect to leave all my v2 sites there unless they require the upgrade as I suspect it would be simple assuming any customizations. Again, time will tell. But you gotta give ‘em credit for innovating. It’s a whole new paradigm, for better and for worse.
I’m now all in with ithemes.com and it’s Builder wp software. Total design control with next to no need for CSS
@Sheila Hoffman
it’s weird Sheila, i’m not sure what they have done but they seem to have made it do less but in a more complicated way.
They have pulled off the amazing trick of changing the WYSWYG visual editor into the WYS is not WYG editor. You draw vague boxes on a screen and then the software is somehow supposed to know what it was you were trying to achieve and present the finished version to you on another screen.
The software now even has a little box telling you that what you are looking at may not be an accurate representation of what the site will look like!!! What then is the point of the Visual Editor???
They have spent so much time playing with the ability to draw a box on screen they have forgotten to make it useful beyond that. Perhaps it doesn’t matter to the new customers thay are seeking, but i saw some ‘advice’ on one of their forums suggesting that when you are in grid view ‘don’t worry about getting it exactly right, Headway will work it out for you!’ – that is EXACTLY what i don’t want out of a piece of software; i actually want it to do what i want it to do, even if it thinks it is the wrong thing to be doing (for some reason it reminds me of that annoying paperclip character that kept popping up in Microsoft Office a few years ago)….
anyway, rant over – i will be going back to Headway 2.0 until i can find a better alternative….SO dissapointed.
PS – if you haven’t actually tried it yet Sheila i guarantee that you will be driven to distraction having to wait for the thing to reload each time you switch between ‘grid’ ‘manage’ and ‘design’ tabs – all things i should point out you could achieve from the one tab in Headway 2.0
I love that y’all are having a great discussion that keeps going on this post. I don’t have that much to contribute to it myself that wouldn’t be based on hearsay, because I decided that Headway’s paradigm didn’t really fit with the way we build sites – so I chose Thesis and Genesis as our preferred platforms, while recommending Headway to those who wanted to try doing it on their own. Thanks to all of you for keeping this topic current.
I have enjoyed keeping track of this thread for some time now (what, 2 years?)! What’s funny is the “recommendation” in your bottom line paragraph at the end probably holds true. What sad commentary on Headway.
I have battled headway for two years now, having given up on it when their javascript loading issues and content delivery would not play nice with my host. I think I may own the longest-standing ticket on Headway Support (and as usual, aggressive comments-closing by their team when you can’t get an issue resolved)
I have high hopes for Headway 3.0, though. You’d think I’d moved on. But I bought a developer license for BOTH Headway AND Thesis, and Thesis simply stays in the dark ages, while Headway at least attempts to move forward.
But I have yet to upgrade my site to 3.0. And I’ll say THANKFULLY. I only have one site on HW any longer, which is a non-profit site which has little concern about things not working properly, since it’s all free, as opposed to paying clients would have fired me a long time ago for the mess that HW has created with disappearing leafs, buggy design editor, and poor performance. I simply hired WP developers to make my sites work properly.
I might say then that this whole concept of frameworks such as HW, Pagelines, Thesis, has been a bit of a misnomer. You simply cannot just drag and drop. And if you can’t, well, you have to HOPE that the slight and under-attended table of contents just MIGHT help. Or you have to go to the forums and learn the tricks, go back and re- code, and spend a lot of time on support, hoping that since they moved to premium support you will get an answer from one of their expert users.
So, is this better than hiring a proper WP expert who can help you past all this, launch a standards-based, best-of-breed WP custom framework for your project WITHOUT the iffy performance and even iffier moods of the main team-members at HW?
It seems that HW 3.0 was indeed pushed out too early, and I’d like to think that their over-focus on add-ons, paid themes, and pricey plugins, extra support, and leafs, all while well and good (they should be able to do this), this focus tended to cloud their focus on building a great, stable product. They simply forgot that the folks with developer licenses were ALREADY premium customers, and they also TALK.
But proof of the early push-out and extraordinary anger from their clients was the following that was in an email sent to HW users this week:
“We would be remiss if we did not state there were some bumps in the road
with the release of Headway 3.0. There were and I can certainly take the
blame for those bumps. I pushed the Team to set a hard launch date and we
stuck to it. Not something we will do again as I am sure they will kick my
sorry butt if I even suggest it. And thanks to all of you who have
provided some great feedback and input. We are getting those bumps leveled
out and removed.
As Clay stated early on with the release of 3.0, we are on a very
aggressive update schedule with 3.0. Which is why you are already seeing
3.0.4. With the next update being worked on as I type this email.
Over the next few weeks, we will be bringing back some of those features
from 2.0.x many of you want. We are also making some changes which will
not only bring back features, but make them even better. 3.0 is a
completely new build and product and we want to make sure all of the
features included are the best they can be.
This is also why we have delayed pushing out our first selection of Headway
themes (child themes). Clay and his team wanted to make sure the new API
was up to the level it should be. And it is. AJ has been working on a
selection of what we plan to release as free child themes for those of you
who need a bit of a starting point to get going.
In addition, I have seen what a few of the 3rd party developers are working
on for child themes and they are amazing. Not only are they building some
incredible themes, I know of a couple who are building in custom Blocks for
their child themes too…. ”
***
So perhaps a bit of a mea-culpa. But with it also came more information about more in their “Marketplace”, which says to me their eye is on profits first, and I’ll take a guess that their priority was to get this up and running so they could sell stuff rather than let those of us who work on customization find the right answers with a stable product.
As I mention above, there is nothing wrong with this approach. Many companies do this. But they do it at their own peril.
Will customers leave? Perhaps. But I think the entire concept of this theme building using a WYSIWYG framework builder is not workable, and perhaps why Thesis has promised 2.0 for what, 10 years now?
HW may just find they are better off taking the Envato template model, but doing it properly with working, standards-based themes for sale. Same with Pagelines, and others, who have struggled with poor support as well. However, the design and UI portion is likely where they tend to fall short internally, so they press on.
Good luck in the new year to those still struggling. And I do hope that the team at HW can make their model work. Me, I’m watching and waiting and have decided to move on to doing what I do best and learning the insides on my own with the help of a real WP developer rather than buggy software that has it’s own Rube Goldberg approach to generating themes.
My .02, of course (and I mean nothing personal to anyone here, so would appreciate nothing personal back!)
@DRColorado – thoroughly enjoyed reading your comment and had to laugh out loud at your mention of –
(and as usual, aggressive comments-closing by their team when you can’t get an issue resolved)
I thought it was just me that had noticed that…. i never wanted to mention it in case i got banned or something.
ps – if the Headway team ever read this, i just wanted to point out i loved Headway 2.0 and would have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone…
As a long-time Headway user, I have to admit that I prefer 2.0 over 3.0. It just seems to make more sense, and had a lot of great features that were removed in 3.0 (though it would appear they’re coming back — one can but hope).
I’ve been enjoying the Envato ThemeForest marketplace, some amazing themes over there for all needs. It’ll be interesting to see if the Headway Marketplace can replicate any of this.
And as DRC mentions, I’ll continue to use a WP designer for my own blog when it comes to it’s next revamp, though that could be a while as my designer Lisa did such a great job last time around.
Speaking of great jobs, way to go on a truly evergreen post, Cynthia!!
Danny, THERE you are! Happy 2012! I figured you must have been really busy if you were missing the discussion happening here. Philosophically, I agree with much of what DRColorado said – although I have to recuse myself on the specifics of Headway’s latest versions. I do know that I had one high-profile client using Headway who finally got frustrated and threw in the towel just a few weeks ago, and switched frameworks – it was a huge decision for him, personally and professionally, but for him it has felt like taking the parking brake off of his business.
What he said about using a professional designer holds true, also, even though agreeing with him seems obviously self-serving – but I just hate to see businesspeople put hundreds of hours into a DIY website project – hours they could have spent BILLING in their own areas of expertise – when they could have delegated that to a qualified WP professional and moved on with the business of business. I think a lot of these frameworks that tout the DIY-ability of their products lure non-IT-skilled people into thinking they can “save” money by building their own site for their business – when really they end up pulling focus away from “making” money.
Hey there Cynthia,
Ha, I know who you’re on about, as I was checking out your portfolio as a possible future collaboration, and I saw the design you had in the portfolio wasn’t the same as the Genesis one.
I do feel WordPress designers are incredibly undervalued, more likely to do with a mix of people still not taking WordPress seriously, and frameworks making promises that can’t possibly be met without some serious coding skills.
Here’s to frameworks making people’s lives easier; but here’s to the true stars of WordPress look and feel, the designers behind the coolness.
Danny, thanks for the reminder that a portfolio update is due! I like to give live links to our work, so people can click through and see how a website FUNCTIONS instead of just how the screenshot works – I find portfolios that don’t do that maddening. There is FAR more to website design and development than appearance.
However, it does put more of a burden on us to check out the items in our own portfolio from time to time to make sure the client hasn’t changed anything substantive or run amok with our carefully crafted design – at which point we’ll remove our credit from the site footer and delete it from the portfolio.
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