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 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”.

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 ?

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

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.

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.

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.