We received a notification from Headway that they are getting ready to release Headway 3.0 – and when they do, the license fee is going up (currently $87 for single-use and $164 for developers). Also, they’re moving to an annual subscription model for updates and ongoing support – but if you buy now, before it comes out, you lock in the current flat rate and get lifetime updates and support for FREE.

The teaser video below looks like it’s going to boast more child themes (we wonder if this will be like Genesis currently does), collaboration with other themes, and even more drag-and-drop layout capability.

If you’re on the fence about trying out Headway, now is the time.
 

Date: March 12, 2010

I just got an email from WishList about an unadvertised promotion they’re doing. I’ve implemented this membership management plug-in for 3 clients so far, and they all love its power and flexibility. A full review is on that list of things to do…now WHERE did I put that list?

Anyway, I could mess around until I get that review done, or I could just let you know that from now until March 17 – that’s next Wednesday people – you can get TWO sites-worth of licensing for WishList for only $25 more than ONE site worth of licensing. To put this in perspective, WishList charges $97 for a single-site license and $297 for a multi-site license. You do that happy savings math.

So – if you’ve been thinking about it, knew you wanted to do more than one site, but almost $300 was holding you back? Do it now. You have to go in through the links on this blog post or the banner below – you can’t get the special via their front door.

You’re welcome.

If you’re like me, you read a lot about search engine optimization. You go to bed with terms like keyword density, backlinks, h1 tags, etc., dancing in your head. And you’re always wondering if you did it right, if you did enough, or if there’s some magic formula everyone else knows and you’re forever going to be scratching your head and trying to figure out what the heck all this analytical stuff means.

That’s where this really cool new SEO plug-in for WordPress comes in, brought to you by Brian Clark (Copyblogger). Provided you are running Thesis, Headway, Hybrid, or the free All-in-One SEO plug-in on some inferior theme (sic), Scribe SEO can analyze your body copy, titles and meta description and tell you how well you’re doing and what you can do better.

You can use it on old content or new stuff you’re writing right now, and Scribe SEO will tell you what the search engines will think you’re writing about. Which is what really matters. Sure, you know what you think is important, but since you can’t sit down across an itsy-bitsy table with the Googlebot and buy it a cappuccino and bore it silly with your elevator pitch – this gives us a peek into how the search engines will read our vaunted prose, guesses what we’re trying to say, and then suggests different ways to say it that might work better. Don’t you wish you had one of those for dating?

I decided to take Scribe for a spin, and since I had my portfolio page open when I clicked over to WordPress, decided, “What the heck?” and ran an analysis on that page.

First, before I could even get a glimpse of the happy blue Analyze button in the Scribe panel, which resides in the upper right corner of the WordPress screen, I saw something that looked like this:

I admit it – the first time I tried this I thought the plug-in was broken. Where was my Analyze button? I posted a ticket on the Scribe SEO support forum and found out that you have to first satisfy the requirements above before you’re allowed to run an Analysis. Oops.

So I copied and pasted my title from the page title field down into the Thesis Custom Title Tag field below the input window, and scored another green checkmark. I had already filled out the Meta Description field on that page, so as soon as I did that, the Analyze button magically appeared to reward me for good behavior.

Then I…clicked it. It went away and cogitated for about, oh, 10 seconds and then I saw this:

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I scored a measly 52% for this page. I don’t think I’ve seen a grade that low since Chemistry 102 at the North Avenue Trade School.  Now I admit, I have spent a lot more time thinking about keyword optimization for my “sales copy” pages rather than my portfolio page – I mean, aren’t people there to look at the pretty pictures? But here’s the beauty of Scribe SEO – it got me to thinking…am I missing out on business by not carefully optimizing every single page of my website? It’s not like I’m in the Yellow Pages. The website is it, baby.

This page told me that I don’t even have any primary keywords that it could find on this page. I got points for word length and hyperlinks, though, so that’s something.  Intrigued, I clicked the Keyword Analysis tab:

Click to enlarge

It told me that it found the phrase “law firm” to be significant, with six appearances, whereas “website designs” appeared only once and was “not emphasized.” Oops. What is it we do here again? Clearly I need to go back and look at the on-page copy wrapped around all the pretty pictures and make an actual effort. This is extremely eye-opening about how we can easily neglect key portions of our real estate – this page is, after all, the second-most viewed page on our site.

Checking out the Change Keywords tab revealed these suggestions:

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Decent SEO copywriting is not rocket science, people, and there has been at least one blog post suggesting that Scribe SEO is not “worth it” if you just “follow these eight steps over and over,” but who DOES that on a regular basis when it’s not your primary job? I certainly feel my hind end getting kicked all over the place by the seemingly harmless Analyze button. I won’t be able to sit down for a week! Small business owners and professionals, what IS free is the lasting effects of actually getting this right.

The Tags tab recommends a list of what it found to be “semantically relevant” terms in the content, and suggests adding them to the tags in your post. Of course, some of these are good and some are completely unintentional. I don’t really care so much about ranking for rowboats, believe it or not:

Click to enlarge

The SERP will show you how your search results will look in Google:

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This got me to thinking, too – even though my description is concise, I do have a few more characters I can use – so I could use the opportunity to say more here to help get that click.

The last tab provides a list of SEO best practices, and also a glossary for those who don’t go to bed thinking SEO (lucky you), so you can learn what all these gnarly terms mean.

How much does it cost?

Scribe SEO is a monthly service, based on the number of times you hit the “Analyze” button. I’d plan on hitting the button an average of 3 times for each piece of content I produced – first to see where I need to make changes, and twice to see the effect of my edits, to judge the best package to purchase. You can get anywhere from 30 evaluations (button hits) per month for $27 to 300 for $97, with the Advanced package. The recommended package is the middle one – 120 evaluations (good for 40-50 pages) for $47.

It’s month-to-month – you can cancel any time if you find you’re not using it enough or getting the value – but if it helps your website draw one more prospect who becomes a client per month? Even if you offer housecleaning services, you just made a profit. Also, if you find you’re using it more than you thought – say, if you got the 30-hit package – you can always upgrade.

Money-saving tip – you don’t have to hit the analyze button just to see the results again – after you have run it once, there’s a “Review” button. If you haven’t made any changes, use that.

Scribe SEO makes on-page search engine optimization and SEO copywriting a whole lot easier – you still have to engage your brain, but at least it speaks a language you can understand.

Worth it.

Next, I’ll annoy you about off-site search engine optimization – backlink creation – and how to get a better handle on that.

As with all my product reviews, the unofficial official Affiliate Disclaimer applies.

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.

The Home Page

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?

The Blog

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.