First things first, I did buy a develpers copy of the thesis wordpress theme. I am using on this blog as I write this post and have no intentions of switching to another because it is pure awesome and I will tell you why.

I don’t know where I first heard about it but it was probably a blog I had come across and liked the layout so clicked the link below and bought, and yes someone financially benefited from it.

I have affiliate links on this blog for thesis because they also have an awesome affiliate program.

As far as I am concerned the Thesis wordpress theme is by far the best functionally workable wordpress theme that I have seen period and I have played around with a few.

I will admit that when I entered the world of websites and blog building I did it all wrong and tried to learn everything myself which just kept delaying and delaying websites and blogs that I wanted to set up because I wanted to learn just a little more html and php coding.

So the Thesis theme is really handy for those who know alot about programming a website but not enough to call yourself and expert then the Thesis theme is perfect for you as it is out ot the box with the ability to tweak how you like.

Picture of the Thesis Theme Options Menu

So if you know a little about php and have tried to code a little this is the perfect theme for you. Or you are a complete newbie and have no idea what I am talking about then this is a great theme to get the blog exactly how you like it without having to search the net to figure out how. The ad targeting features alone for the professional (or semi-professional) blogger should easily make up the cost of buying the theme to begin
with if you’re getting any decent traffic.

Picture of the thesis design options menu

Within the admin panel there is alot of functionality with with being able to tick boxes, change color schemes, add or take away columns, change heights, and fonts, increase size to get the layout that you want, and then installing a plugin that will alow you to code certain php changes that makes making your OWN blog so much easier. All of this is done with a click of the mouse.

Picture of my current multi media box

One of the big pluses with the Thesis theme which I haven’t taken full advantage of yet is the use of the multi-media box. It sits right in the top spot of the sidebar and as of the date of this post you will see an ad for hostgator hosting in the multmedia box.

The great thing about this box is you can simply change the media
to suit your posts. If you right a post about thesis theme like I have hear, then I should go in and add a thesis theme affiliate banner so that it appears on my thesis theme post.

Within each page/post you are able to customize the image through a custom key so there is no further programing needed. If you view the photo above, you’ll see I was able to select the “custom” key I defined in the Thesis control panel and “override it”and insert specific code to replace the normal “custom” key, only for this post. This allows me to target my advertising on specific pages, especially higher traffic ones.

You could simply just search the internet and learn all of this stuff yourself, I mean everything that chris Pearson has done with wordpress you could do with any wordpress blog, but then why bother the thesis theme is really a one stop theme shop, that you can change with out having to learn anything complicated.

Based on what I have searched, the thesis wordpress theme is probably the most SEO friendly theme I have come across, and allows for a lot of variability in how to determine your seo without having to install a
ton of different plugins, but it is still lacking in some minor things that you can accomplish with the following plugins:

• SEO title tag (to be able to change the titles of the category pages which you can’t do in thesis)
• RSS footer ( so that you can have new streaming content on your blog 24/7)
• Permalink redirect (keeps the posts SEO friendly)
• Custom query string (more control over your titles)
• WordPress breadcrumbs
• SEO slugs (keeps the seo clean and functional)
• Robots meta (wordpress is heavy on the files so you need control over the google search bot, which thesis doesn’t provide, YET!)

Since I do a lot of social media posting it would be great to have these options like digg, delicious or stumble upon to tick and have the images post in a way that suits you and your customization needs. An option to check off a box to enable a div to make the Digg plugin align with your text without having to actually touch the design template .

Having an option within the design template to create a contact form rather then have to load another plugin would also be nice.

I would also like to have the ability to control my advertisements more on all pages/categories/ and archive pages.

One of the best features in Thesis is the Multimedia box, which lets you put rotating pictures or a videos in your posts. There’s a default option for all pages, but Thesis uses WordPress’s built in custom fields function
to post specific photos or videos for any page or post you wish. This is great for YouTube videos, photos, and even page-specific advertising.

Picture of the Thesis 1.6 wordpress theme Nav Menu

With the release of version 1.6 my favorite part of thesis now is being able to change everything about your navigation menu from the color, to the size to what catories/pages and posts you would like to appear.

Buy buying the thesis theme you get a great support structure. There have been numerous times I have gone to the forum to ask questions about how to do this and that and there is always an answer. There has been so much forum activity over the last year that just searching google with questions relating to thesis will usually find you a solution.

With each new release the platform just gets better and better, which is the great thing about buying it as you get all future upgrades for free. One of the negatives of thesis which will probably be dealt with in future
upgrades is if you were wanting a photo blog as it is not completely photo friendly and it would be great if there was a built in feature gallery that was easy to change and rotate images like the plugin feature content gallery, but those are minor negatives and that will probably be dealt with in future updates.

Is it worth spending money for a wordpress theme and in particular the thesis theme, yes. $87 is not a lot to spend for something that will save you a ton of time, even if you end up customizing the heck out of it
(which I know I will) all of your changes will be future proof due to how Thesis is designed.

I love it so much I shelled out $164 for the developers version and slowly converting all my blogs to thesis

So here is the deal, if you are going to buy the thesis theme then buy it through my link, then send an email to alan at alanjenks dot com with your reciept and here is what I am going to do.

1. Send you a video of exactly how I use thesis and what plugins I installed.
2. A report of where the best places to put ads that have converted well for me.
3. Another video of simple tricks that I do in wordpress to maximize traffic and profit for my blog

So Click This Link, then email me your purchase reciept

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Tagged as: chrispearson, thesisthemereview, thesiswordpresstheme