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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Fantastic comparison, Cynthia. As a non-coder, I love Headway for the ease-of-use you mention in your review. I changed my blog over from Thesis in about 5-6 hours, out of the box from the skeleton framework without CSS or HTML. I’ve since been building dummy Headway sites on my test sub-domains to offer different looks (corporate websites, realtor sites, news blogs, tech blogs, etc) and it continues to impress.
I have a huge amount of respect for what Chris Pearson has accomplished with Thesis and it’s still a fantastic theme. It’ll be interesting to see what 2.0 has, along with Headway 1.5 and the news that they’re about to share.
As you say, the forums are fairly straightforward at the minute, though for having been up for less than a month, probably not surprising
It’s great that there are now two really powerful themes around, and it’s what the WordPress community needs. Friendly competition is always great and at the end of the day, it’s us, the user, that benefits.
Thanks for a great comparison, always good to hear from a developer’s viewpoint.
Good review. I’ve been considering purchasing one or the other of these for a test drive. I’m leaning toward Headway simply because I’m not a developer. I’m a copywriter who ghostwrites a ton of blogs and I use WordPress exclusively. I know my clients will benefit from a premium theme and before Headway came along I’d considered purchasing Thesis. I will likely purchase both at some point and compare them, but your overview here helps me to get a better idea of what to expect from Headway. Many thanks!
@Allen – I think owning both is a great idea, and is a tiny investment in comparison to what they both have to offer at this very moment and what is promised for the near future (with free updates). I think, provided both teams keep up the game in quality, stability and WordPress compatibility, that it could become like the Nikon vs. Canon debate – it’s been going on for decades, and there are really no losers. It’s early to say at this point.
Can anyone tell me if you can stack multiple content leafs on top of each other with the headway theme? I would want to have multiple loops running on a homepage that may have 5 or six content leafs stacked in a main content column.
Hi Brad,
The ability to stack is pretty much endless – all you need do is stretch one to increase the dimensions of the box where your leafs are and then flip each one in and you’re good to go.
Brad – yes – you can stack multiple content leafs. See my category page for an example: http://johnhaydon.com/category/facebook/
On the left I have a text/html leaf, followed by the content area and then finally a wigitized footer at the bottom. On the side bar I have three stacked leafs as well.
Cinthia – awesome review! I love Thesis, and have lots of respect for Chris Pearson and the folks in their forum. Like Danny, though, I just didn’t have time to spend in a forum when I’m trying to run a business. I recently used one line of CSS code in Headway to create a floating background.
Yes, Headway is behind Thesis in a few areas, but in terms of ease of use and the amount of flexibility you can have (without coding or spending hours in a forum).
Oh, and Cythia. I love what you’ve done with Thesis, here!
Thanks, John!
Y’all will have to pardon me for any delays in getting comments with links moderated. I’m trying to upgrade my OS this evening, because I’m just such a Saturday night party animal!
I’m very new to WordPress and chose a Yamidoo theme for my first blog (to get a certain look I wanted for that one). But then I needed to choose a template for my second blog. I went with Headway for the drag-and-drop feature, because of my lack of design skills.
I haven’t been able to get started yet (waiting for our host to get the latest version of php; required with Headway) but I’m looking forward to importing my blog from Blogger.com to see what I can do with it in Headway. I’m glad I found this article and thank you for the honest review.
So when it comes to custom css and modifying typography…did you find that it was still difficult to produce your desired results with the framework?
Or was that more in reference to the built in typography editor. Personally I like to be in full control of my type and like to use unconventional fonts when I can.
I really am considering going with headway just because of how easy it appears to be to make literally any type of grid layout you want with it, which happens to be my biggest stumbling block when it comes to web dev. I like the idea of being able to make unconventional layouts that have varying widths and heights.
That and the ability to have a different layout on every page without coding it to be that way is really just amazing.
If the typography really is a pain to style though, it makes me wonder how much of a pain it will be to style everything else. I’m used to using tools such as stylizer (skybound.ca) which is an absolutely ridiculously amazing visual css editor but I have been getting poor results messing around with headway powered sites with it which is the only reason I have not purchased it yet.
Hi Stephan,
Modifying the typography is not “difficult” if you know CSS. I was frustrated with the framework when it came to making the footer look like I wanted it to without modifying core files at this point, but if you are willing to work within those constraints, that’s the only framework issue I ran across. My experiment was predicated upon recreating my existing home page EXACTLY. If I were starting from scratch, I would probably make the official “footer” divs a visual non-issue and use their horizontal widgetized leaf for an area that would “read” like a footer to visitors. But I was operating within the principles of my experiment.
As I’m sure you know, you can’t use too many unconventional fonts and expect users to also be able to view them, unless you’re using a font scripting service like Cufon or sifR, or the new @font-face command with CSS – which only shows up in Firefox 3.5 and not at all in IE versions. Better typography options that are portable across the web are something all of us designers are eagerly awaiting, and they are in the works right now if you follow typography circles.
Headway definitely shines when it comes to being able to make any type of grid layout you want without getting a coding migraine – a small amount of the time saved on that can definitely be spent tweaking a few fonts in custom.css.
If you are familiar with Firebug or similar tools and have some patience, learning Headway’s architecture to do most common styling tasks is not that much of a chore, and the developer and other users are very responsive to questions in the forum. I do my CSS in either Dreamweaver or Notepad, so I’m not familar with other tools.
I hope this helps!
Hi,
thanks for the comparison, that’s what I’ve been looking for. Unfortunately it’s still hard to choose.
I’d like to add an onsite-blog (as subfolder) to my site. I’m not great in coding (especially php is poor) and will have to manage some design adapting, i.e., the blog should have
-the same background colour and fonts
-the same header pics as the site-homepage and
-a horizontal header navi with CSS-dropdown: TWO rows (2 x 6 links), leading to the pages outside (!) the blog (within the site)
-a video embedded.
Maybe later the whole site should run by wordpress as CMS.
Could you give me a recommendation? Or anyone else here?
Martin, both of these come with the ability to have static content as your home page and a blog included. If you do this, you can have the layout match exactly, as it all flows through the site.
If you want easy multi-level menus, I’d go with Headway. It builds dynamic drop-down menus automatically if you use parent-child pages – no coding necessary. I forgot to mention this in my comparison.
I’ve tried the demo version of headway but couldn’t find a way to generate a navi with links to pages OUTSIDE the blog. It just seems to handle pages/articles/archives within the blog. The homepage of the whole site (not of the blog) for example won’t appear at the navigation options in headway. So I can’t make it a part of the header menu.
The site already exists and after adding the blog as subfolder I want to give blog-visitors a way to find the non-blog-pages of the site. Of course every Premium WP-Theme allows to make static pages and make the blog-homepage a static page. But this just refers to the blog and doesn’t include non-blog-pages around the blog. These seem to be out of control. Therefore I supposed there is no way out of the box.
Martin – perfect timing! I actually did a screen cast of the nav bar features in Headway, where you can link to an outside site: http://johnhaydon.com/2009/08/create-dropdown-menus-navigation-headway-theme/
John
John,
Thanks for stepping in on that one. I was just rummaging around in my Headway CP and couldn’t find anything. I’m going to take in that vid myself! Of course, this capability has been in Thesis for quite some time – you just add a Link Category – I usually call mine “Navigation” and then the Thesis Options panel provides a checkbox for you to include the links in a category in your navigation menu.
Again, much appreciated.
@John:
Have answered at your blog…
@Rowboat Media:
Gives this checkbox the option to type in the URLs manually? As I explained at Johns blog, in case of an onsite-blog the automatical created URLs probably will be wrong (because linked pages are not part of the blog).
Do you know a tutorial for exactly such a horizontal CSS-dropdown navi, where it is explained in detail?
So, what’s the bottom line for someone who (A) is not a coder, and (B) does not yet own either of these themes? Which one would suggest for the first-time buyer?
Thanks!
@Martin – if you are referring to the capability in Thesis, you enter the URL yourself into WordPress’ Links control panel, and assign it to the Navigation link category you already created – you can link to CNN if you want to. Those are both WordPress capabilities regardless of theme. Then you go to Thesis Options and check the magical box.
@SoundsGood – it all boils down to timing. Thesis has a v2.0 coming VERY soon – word on the Tweet says September, and rumor has it that it will include similar capabilities. Pearson works from the foundational code upward because he is cursed by perfectionism – but then you know any pretty things he piles on top are on the firmest foundation possible. I can’t wait to see what he puts out – and he’ll issue a beta first to those with Developer Licenses, so more advanced users can help hammer out any last bugs.
Headway already has layout capabilities for the non-coder, TODAY. If you absolutely need it in the next 30 days and want to do it all yourself, Headway is a no-brainer. If you want to wait 30 days and make a decision, I will most certainly be writing another comparison post once Thesis v2.0 comes out.
Unfortunately, as my graphic up top suggests, at this moment it really is an apples vs. oranges comparison. Hope this helps!
>> Thesis has a v2.0 coming VERY soon…
Hmm. I guess my concern is that I’ve heard that Thesis is great, code-wise — but is somewhat difficult for those that don’t know a thing or two about coding. If someone could tell me that Thesis v2 eliminates that concern, and makes things as easy as Headway seems to be, I’d surely wait for it. But not knowing that info makes it a tough call right now.
Anyway, thanks for your help!
Thanks!
I probably will wait up to your next comparison, but as a non-coder I strongly tend to purchase Headway – allthough usually I don’t purchase “new” things (hardware, software, cars, whatever), usually this is wise. In Germany we call it “green banana” risk (don’t know the proper translation for this term).
@Martin – Green banana! I love it! It is perfect and needs no translation. I’ll be borrowing that myself in the future.
Don’t let me discourage you in any way from purchasing Headway – and I look forward to your comments on my next comparison post.
I’m on the fence too. I was just about to push the purchase Thesis button when I decided to continue searching and came across the Headaway results. Which is what I actually wish I had done is head away. But now I’m like everyone else who has straddled this fence, confused. Thesis seems to me to be so much more powerful and I love the ability to switch column formats. But everyone has me absolutely petrified about the whole coding thing. I’ve used frontpage and xsitepro for web design so I’m heavily reliant on the canned stuff. I’ve seen the Thesis example sites and they all look fantastic, but I’m afraid they are all custom built and probably way beyond my reach within a month’s timeframe. I’m afraid to purchase Headaway because with my budget, I cannot afford both and I’m afraid I won’t be as happy with the output as I might be with Thesis. What a pickle.
@Soundsgood. It will definitely be interesting to see what Thesis 2.0 offers. Although having seen what Clay has in store with Headway 1.5 (due imminently and free to all existing), September promises to be an eventful month indeed!
@Anton. You can switch column formats with Headway – you just drag the column to where you want it to go. Simple.
And you can check out some Headway showcases here: http://headwayhq.com/category/showcase
Hope that helps!
Any word on what features the new Thesis V2 might have?
The Thesis theme has rock-solid SEO and top-notch support. The latest beta version, available to all with a developer’s license, has built-in drop-down menus and much, much more. I’m using it for a corporate client site, in fact.
Can’t afford to trifle with a newcomer’s theme, myself.
@John. Agree, John, 1.6 is great (although wish Chris had stuck to his original statement that nothing would be released until v2.0). But in all fairness, can you really say that you “can’t afford to trifle with a newcomer’s theme” when it could benefit your clients by allowing faster dev time? Maybe the next couple of weeks could have you re-looking…
Anyone know when the next version of Headway will be released?
Also, what about Thesis? (same question)
@SoundsGood. This is a post from the Headway blog about updates:
http://headwaythemes.com/headway-themes/will-there-be-updates-for-headway-themes-headwaywp/
No date announced on it, although it does adhere to sooner rather than later….
Hi: Thanks for this helpful comparison. I notice, that, today, Nov 14, Thesis is still at v1.6, a couple of months after your September prediction.
1: Should we all take that as a “bad” sign about Thesis’s continuing development?
2: From Headway’s website, I can not tell which version it is now at….did Headway correct the issues that you noted in your review?
3: Which of these will allow me to make a variety of page templates, to assign as static pages>in other words, do the layout editing feature only make a “theme” or do either or both layout editors create page templates to use within a created theme?
Thanks!
Hi Darryl,
1. Absolutely not. The Thesis folks are meticulously perfectionistic – Thesis continues to evolve, but carefully and correctly. Version 2.0 is on the way, and Pearson and Clark are dropping STRONG hints that it will come with a price increase. Current license holders will, of course be protected by lifetime updates.
2. Headway just released version 1.5 TODAY.
3. Your question is a bit confusing, but I’ll try to answer what I think is the spirit of it – you can create custom page templates in Thesis with some knowledge of PHP. You can have unique page layouts for each and every page in Headway with the existing drag and drop layout capability provided by that theme, without having to do any PHP coding.
Watch this space for a Thesis 1.6 v Headway 1.5 comparison sometime after Thanksgiving – I have a Headway project to develop for a client coming up, and it will be a great way for me to get a deep view of 1.5’s capabilities. I have already been working with Thesis 1.6 for a couple of months and have launched several sites using that version.
thanks for your fast and good reply. One more question about Headway, which I struggle to find information about (I wish both headway and thesis would provide a “pre-sales” forum, or, at least, read access to their support forum). In your review, you mentioned the rotating image header versus the Thesis option to have a random static image. I like the random static image header idea….is that now implemented in headway 1.5? Thanks for your really helpful blog!
Darryl,
The header image is not what rotates – it is items placed in the multimedia box with Thesis that have the option of randomly choosing from images in the Thesis rotator folder. For an example, check out all the beachy photos on this website – they’re in the multimedia box.
I have not put my hands on Headway 1.5 yet, but to my knowledge they don’t have a rotating HEADER image either – that would require some additional coding. They do, however, make it easy for you to upload a header image directly from the control panel (or even, from their new even more visual visual editor) and they offer “slideshow” widgets you can incorporate into your site layout – but they will move on their own.
I hope this helps. Also, you can put questions out on Twitter and use the #headwaywp hashtag – @GrantGriffiths monitors that closely and if he sees your question under that hashtag, he will probably give an answer – or another Headway user will do the same.
The same applies for the #thesiswp hashtag for pre-sales Thesis questions.
Hey there Darryl,
As Cynthia mentions, the header is easy to upload on Headway as opposed to Thesis, but neither (from the looks of it) rotate. Headway 1.5 is incredibly powerful, though, and makes site design easy.
It will be interesting to see what Thesis 2.0 does, considering it’s now more than 2 months overdue…
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/why-i-promote-the-hell-out-of-thesis/#comment-13909059
Ooops, my bad – here’s a hack on how you can have rotating header images with Headway
http://headwayhacks.com/how-to-create-rotating-header-images-in-headway
Hi Danny and Cynthia: Thanks for your replies!
Hi Cynthia!
I’ve been following the comments here, and your comparisons of The Big Two. For the moment I’m using Headway 1.5, but I’ve not ruled out Thesis. My question really would apply to either one.
Typography. I want more control over things such as, e.g. the placement of the header text. Yes, I know it can be done with an image, but that’s an imperfect solution. As it stands right now, I had to spend solid days exchanging with CSS mavens just to get the code to move the blog header from flush left to center or flush right.
But the typogapher in me (traditional media background there, and in graphics) wants to be able to move it say, by ems. Justnudging it to look just right.
It seems like I’ve got to learn a LOT of CSS in order to do something like that. I’m not scared of coding — in the old days designed websites entirely by handwith html coding (and I’ve used both assembly language and C/C+++ to write Windows programs), but the CSS seems like a black art. It takes timeaway from what I am doing which is designer andwriter and typographer.
Please tell me it isn’t so. That I don’t have to do fulltime CSS to get thetypography I want (I’ve a long wish list; the header was just a modest example).
Tnks for listening and answering!
%%robert
Robert,
That’s what I was trying to say in my original post, coming from a designer’s perspective – Headway is offering a lot in their visual editor, but you still have to be willing to play INSIDE their box – no matter how much they expand it. If you want to be 100% in control of EVERY TINY DETAIL, there is no theme on earth that can guess what those details are out of the box.
You either have to hire a CSS sorcerer or cut the head off a live chicken and become one. Pithy sayings about having cakes and eating them come to mind.
I don’t consider an image header an imperfect solution – it allows me to be as perfectionist as I want, use whatever fonts I want without worrying about whether my viewer has them, etc. The way I use image headers in Thesis still allows for the title and tagline to appear in the metadata – they are just cast way off to the left visually in the code – so there is no SEO downside to doing so.
I would imagine Headway also kicks out those heading titles in source code – but I would doublecheck. So, if there’s no SEO downside, what downside is there? Use your prodigious graphic design skills and have fun designing a header image instead of making things extra hard for yourself.
Perfectionism launches no sites. Unlaunched sites make no wampum.
My $.02 on 3 hours of sleep…
Cynthia
you wrote>>Watch this space for a Thesis 1.6 v Headway 1.5 comparison sometime after Thanksgiving – I have a Headway project to develop for a client coming up, and it will be a great way for me to get a deep view of 1.5’s capabilities. <<) I will be eagerly looking forward to reading your deeper comparison from your experience, sooner, as I try to consider our winter website plans.
thanks!
Cynthia–
(Apologies: no true em-dash)
Wow. If that’s what you can do/write on 3 hours’ sleep, on a full nite…well, I’ve looked at your designs. Formidable. To say the least.
When a Pro confirms, that’s straight from The Burning Bush. I might have a problem with the chickens since I’m a vegetarian, but I expect Tofurkey would get the job done. This because in my day (=$) job, I’ve published literally thousands of pages on ancient Roman religion. So the sacriuficial methodology will be 1-2-3 4me.
But seriously. Your point about perfectionism is eloquent and true. Gotta switch into Right-Brain mode more often.
Doing a header image would be fun. Few yrs. ago I co-authored a big book on Photoshop — just gotta get fully up to speed on CS4 and that will be that.
I’ve already checked. Headway does that. SEO will be all happy.
Greatly appreciated yr. manner and matter; filled with insights abnd excites. Whoops, there I go again….
“I’ll be back”
%%robert
Thank you so much for your excellent article. Since there are fellow designers here I thought I’d share my experience. I’d added WP to several static sites using Dreamweaver but this is my first all-WP site. That’s why I was exploring framework editors rather than free themes. After reading your review, I tried the Headway demo which is v1 and loved its ease. I bought it and spent all day yesterday in v1.5 pulling my hair out! This morning when I still had not 1 response in the Headway forums to my THREE desperate posts for help, I decided to install v1. A few hours later I have my first Headway site on its way to completion. I still have some questions to work out. But given I have at least a little CSS, HTML and PHP experience I was comfortable messing around. I’m keeping notes for myself.
But frankly, I think it’s appalling that both of these products have forums that are locked until you buy. If I’d been in the forum I would’ve realized that v1.5 was only a few days old and still buggy as hell. I’d have also realized how few people are posting in the forum and how little support is available there. I’m still happy with Headway and hope they’ll have the bugs worked out before I need it for another site.
Thanks!
Sheila,
Thank you for the perspective you added to this discussion! I have a design project using Headway 1.5 coming up next week, and I hope that everything goes well with that.
Regarding the forums – it’s daunting to hear that the Headway forums have not yet grown to the depth and helpfulness the Thesis forums had achieved by the same amount of time post-debut. Hopefully time will improve that.
I think part of the problem is the absence of real “geeks” on the Headway forums, due to the theme’s target market – whereas a friend of mine once said, “Thesis has geek appeal.” Where the coding geeks gather, help on a real problem-solving level is most likely to be found. Headway likes to market itself as a “no geekiness necessary” product, so you can unfortunately end up with the blind leading the blind.
I don’t agree, however, that the support forums should be available pre-purchase – they are one of the value-added items that license holders have access to, and, quite frankly, encourage legitimate licensing over piracy. I do acknowledge that it makes a certain kind of “insider” research more difficult.
Again, I appreciate your taking the time to add to this discussion, and look forward to reading some inevitable responses from the Headway camp.
Sheila–
Aah. My sentiments exactly (details supra). I got bit by two things, one a bug (proven) and the other not knowing enough CSS. Hair pulling = understatement. It took a couple of days on the Hway forums, but people started showing up and I got my CSS answer.
I agree both with you and Cynthia about the “private forums”. It’s certainly true that the web is cawling with freebie seekers. Combine open forums with what’s surely on torrents and it could be pencils + tin cups for theme designers.
BUT…what’s a poor enduser (prospective) to do? True, $160something isn’t enormous for developer edition of a theme. But it will buy a couple of icecream cones. Maybe developers should do what several web hosts do — a PreSales forum (I found them incredibly helpful when evaluating hosts). Theme developers wouldn’t get ripped off by the freebie seekers, and us little people could find outmore before forking over the…wampum.
%%robert
Robert,
Thanks for the welcoming response. You’re right about the forums being a perk of ownership… AND… Perhaps a pre-purchase section that is open. If I’d posted there and got zero responses in two days I’d have learned a lot. And good luck with that 1.5 project. I have to tell you it is so buggy. A lot of things aren’t working. I couldn’t create a viable site with it. I’ll be eager to hear how it goes for you.
Sheila,
Exactly on bugs. Which is why, as soon as I finish typing, I’m off to Thesis. Too much time fussing when I want to be designing and writing. Cynthia put it best up above in response to me:
“Unlaunched sites make no wampum.”
Will be in touch.
%%robert
@Sheila. I know the issues you were having, and I also saw that Clay had responded to you in the forums. With regards the “delay”, he had a problem with Internet access in NYC which hindered his ability to help. I have to say, as a die-hard Thesis user prior to Headway, I find his personal help much more helpful than “another” developer’s. If it wasn’t for the folks in the Thesis community helping each other out, then we’d be having a different conversation altogether…
As for there being a bigger community for Thesis post-launch than Headway, that’s kinda obvious, considering there were about 3 themes prior to Thesis to build Chris Pearson’s userbase, with Cutline, Neo-Classical and CopyBlogger’s just a few. Considering Headway has come clean out the gate and is trying with a really unique approach to website design, then I think they’re doing a damn good job of building a community and supporting it.
Sorry if this seems “partisan”, but I’m tired of the “no support” angle that’s coming across here, which quite frankly is untrue.
@ Danny: I’m not trying to bash these guys just telling my experience. I’m actually very hopeful based on your reply. But to be fair, none of my 3 original posts have any response. Clay did respond to two other people’s posts that I also replied on. I have not received notification on any responses either. He suggested we read another thread which I’d already read and did not answer the question at hand. I hope your belief in them is well founded. Time will tell. I don’t do enough WP business to merit buying a second tool at this time so I’m cool with what I’ve got.
The comments about Headway 1.5 being buggy are raising a red flag for me. For me, a content focused person interested in design, and definately not php savy, buggy means a need to code, which, is what I thought Headway is a path away from, compared to Thesis.
A pre -sales forum for both products seems a no-brainer and total help for those of us devining a choice between the two.
Indeed, I don’t even see a way to contact Thesis customer service people on their website, prior to purchase…no email address, as far as I see…..that is definately a big red flag.
It’s extremely interesting to me how this blog post has become a discussion forum of sorts, which I’m totally cool with facilitating – and I know Danny Brown can always be counted on to wade in on the Headway side! He must have been in a concrete bunker, because it took him about 5 seconds longer than it usually does.
@Darryl – both themes do offer a 30-day money back guarantee, so I’d feel confident with either one on that level. Sometimes the best way to know if a particular product’s paradigm (alliteration, oooh) is for you, is just to get your hands in it. @pearsonified, @godhammer, and @kristarella are always easy to get in touch with via Twitter on the Thesis side, and Headway does post a support email in the footer of their website.
Both companies are ethical and customer-oriented, at the end of the day.
What I would like is for these “bugs” to be defined, for both my own edification and that of others. Having not put my hands in Headway 1.5 myself, I’d like to know what is being viewed as a problem. Due to some family medical issues, I’m not exactly long on time for forum searching – so @Sheila, your being more specific would be helpful.
Happy to be more specific. Keep in mind that being completely new to Headway I didn’t (and still don’t) know just how much is my ignorance, local system issues and/or bugs. But given what I’m seeing in their forums the things listed here are either bugs or major oversights. Most, if not all, are within the new Visual Editor. These are direct pastes from my forum posts there…
1) The Visual Editor is horribly slow. And apparently you can’t see a lot of the changes until you save which is quite odd for a WYSIWYG editor. I had to go back and forth a lot…change, save, view, repeat.
2) Not everything I do actually is saved when I click save. I tried to remove the 2px spacing in the leaf headings and saved it (twice) but I still have 2px spacing. WHY?
3) As posted elsewhere I can NOT upload a header image despite my best educated efforts (correct permissions, etc). Other images are uploading. Is there a work-around to get an image header up?
4) It appears there’s no way to add images to text leafs without resorting to using html. while I can do that, it seems quite odd for a WYSIWYG visual editor! I doubt most of your customer base would be able to do that.
5) When buying the developer package, where do I remove the Powered by Headway in the footer? This is offered as a benefit of the package yet there’s no obvious way to do so. I was able to do this by editing the footer.php file but most folks needing this tool wouldn’t know to look there OR be comfortable doing so.
6) Documentation is marginal and has no search function.
That’s all I can think of for now. Hope that helps. Clay did finally respond to one of my posts and said these are things they’re aware of and working on for the next release but I don’t know when that will be or how completely they’ll succeed in addressing them. The biggest things are the slowness and not being able to successfully upload images or save styles!