Why Thesis?

Many of you have asked why I use the Thesis WordPress framework for your web design projects whenever possible.  There are several good reasons for this – reasons that benefit me, as the designer (in terms of making my job easier) and reasons that benefit you, as the client (in terms of making money with your website).

I’ve broken this up into skimmable chunks for those of you skimmers out there.  You know who you are.  I can’t help it that it’s still longer than the average American’s attention span, which rivals that of a Mayfly.  Which has an excuse, because it has a half-hour life span.  But as usual, I digress…

Why WordPress?

First, I’ll back up and discuss why I use WordPress as a foundation for web designs.

Search Engine Optimization

WordPress sites are text-based (although with careful graphic design, they don’t have to look dominated by text), and their structure makes it very easy for Google’s search robot to crawl.  What this means is that your site gets indexed quickly and often, so that the people who are looking to hand you money can find you.

This is in sharp contrast to Flash-based websites, or websites that look like text, but are really just a series of graphics because the designer didn’t have the skill to use CSS to control the appearance of fonts in a searchable manner.  Neither one of these is going to get you much Google love, except for the warm fuzzy feeling they get when you have to keep paying for Google Adwords to get any clicks.

Killer Content Management System

I’m in the business of empowering you to make changes to your website whenever you want – including at 2 am on a Sunday morning, without requiring my intervention or a bill from me.  I have clients who aren’t remotely interested in being empowered, and instead want full service – for them, I have the WebMistress Service.

However, there are those of you have paid a lot of money in the past for a snazzy web design and then couldn’t find your designer to make a small update – or, alternatively, you got presented with a big bill for doing so.  So, like the self-reliant folks you are, you decided you could get in there with your Word HTML editor or FrontPage and make that one little change to the second paragraph on the home page…only to see the whole design fall to pieces.  If this is you, you need to know that you can make updates on your own, if necessary, without having to hire a private detective and take out a second mortgage.  For you, the WordPress content management system is perfect and helps you sleep at night.

Thesis is More than a Theme

If you’re familiar with WordPress already, you may be aware that there are literally THOUSANDS of free themes out there and hundreds of premium themes.  So why do I use Thesis, which comes with an $87 price tag for one site, and a developer license that lets you build as many Thesis sites as you like (as long as you own them) for $164?

I’ll tell you.  You knew I would.

Ease of Customization

If you’ve ever downloaded one of those lovely free themes, which are great if you’re just Joe the Golf Blogger, but aren’t quite perfect for your actual business, and then tried to make some modifications and ended up banging your head on the keyboard at 3 am, you know what I’m talking about.  You get what you pay for – and if you’re not a PHP programmer (in which case you would have just written your own theme), you can find yourself in the weeds QUICKLY messing around with these templates.  No money saved if you have a messed-up looking site that you’re embarrassed for your prospects to see, and now you’re sleep-deprived for that next big sales meeting.

Thesis has a lot of customization built into its two options panels – you can change the number of columns, their position and width, etc., with the click of a mouse.  You can also set your fonts for any number of elements, turn the multimedia box off and on and embed special code into it, and other really cool things without knowing a scrap of programming.  (This is the part where I’d put in screenshots of the panels if I were a scholar and a great humanitarian.  However, Chris Pearson has done such a beautiful job with his videos of how these panels work that I feel it’s just a giant waste of time for me to stick some static little screenshot in there.  Go check them out.)

If you’re not a designer, it can get you awfully close to what you need.  If you ARE a designer, it saves time (and therefore saves clients money) on the nuts-and-bolts things that you don’t need to be coding over and over.

Search Engine Optimization on STEROIDS

If you thought the SEO with WordPress alone was good, hoo boy check it out with Thesis.  In the words of its developer (and this is truth, not hubris), “Thesis boasts the strongest SEO of any theme on the market today thanks to its expertly-coded HTML + CSS + PHP framework.”

Sites I build using Thesis are getting indexed within a week for target keywords and, depending on the client, quickly start climbing in the rankings – it’s absolutely amazing.  I had one client, who with his old website design was on the second page of Google at #19 (useless) jump to midway down the first page in less than 10 days after replacing his old website (same URL) with a Rowboat Media design.  Even using his old website copy!  Today, 8 weeks later, he is #1 in organic search results for the same keywords.  That’s at no extra charge, people.  Your mileage may vary.

The technical reasons for this are rather geeky, but one reason is that Thesis can be customized completely without changing the underlying HTML framework – and Google doesn’t like it when you change your site structure – it can hurt you in the page rankings.  So you can update your site daily without touching the foundation code and annoying Papa G.

Futureproof against WordPress and Browser Updates

If you have a Thesis site, you don’t have to worry about getting left behind by changes in web technology.  The framework is constantly being updated to keep up with new WordPress releases – and if you’ve ever used a free theme that suddenly lost its mind with a WordPress update, you know how important this is.  Not only that, the PHP and CSS under the hood are always state-of-the-art.  As the Web evolves, so does Thesis.

Amazing Support

Thesis comes with a forum that is available only to license-holders – and that forum is crammed full of CSS and PHP experts who have seen just about any situation you can throw at them – post a question and they’ll help you out at no extra charge.  I’ve found the forum to be extremely useful, and I’ve also taken the opportunity to make myself useful, too.  If you own a Thesis license and have posted a question on the forum, feel free to Tweet me or email me and let me know – I’ll take a stab at it or refer you to someone I think can help.

Gorgeous Typography

It’s the subtle things we often don’t notice that go into creating a beautiful website.  I’m a typography geek, for example, and often get compliments on my elegant use of fonts.  Chris Pearson is also a typography geek, but he’s gone one step further – Thesis automatically calculates the perfect line heights and proportions throughout your site for whatever fonts and sizes you’ve chosen.  This means that even if you choose the font equivalent of vanilla – Times New Roman – even it will somehow look more “right” on a Thesis site than other sites.  It’s like the difference between fine cashmere and the cheap stuff.

Do I need to pay for Thesis to use your services?

No, you don’t.  I absorb the cost of a Thesis Client Site License ($40 for those like me who have a Developer License) into the price of my design services.  When you hire Rowboat Media for web design, you get all that juicy goodness built in.  If you’re not ready to hire a designer at this point and are looking for a do-it-yourself website – you can’t go wrong with Thesis for WordPress.

If Thesis is so easy to customize, then why do I need to pay YOU?

“Easy” is a relative term.  Thesis does let you make a lot of structural changes just with the two options panels – but still basically ends up looking like Thesis out-of-the-box.  If you want a truly customized, branded web identity with functionality that gives you a headache to think about implementing yourself, that’s where I come in.

Also, not every web designer can handle Thesis – I’ve seen talented and experienced web designers, used to building sites from scratch, stumble over Thesis – its code construction, while stunningly elegant, is like nothing many from-scratch HTML designers have ever seen.  They don’t know not to edit core files, etc., and the results can be – unexpected.  I’ve had to swoop in with my superhero cape after the fact and save the day for a few of these situations.

So – if you want a fully-customized website and you’ve become convinced that you’d like it built on Thesis, look for a Thesis designer – we’ve put in the hours to know our way around this elegant framework so we can spend our time making things look beautiful.

Either way, don’t forget that life is supposed to be FUN!

Interested in a custom website design by Rowboat Media?

Check out:

• our services page for more details about what we offer,
• find out how we work,
• read our client references, and then
• submit a website design inquiry.