How the Wordpress Theme Can Help Build Your Online Presence

I have been using the Word­press The­sis theme for about two weeks, and it is amaz­ing how quickly you can build a professional-looking site in a very short amount of time!

I know a bit about HTML, PHP, and CSS, but I really don’t have the time to mess with all that because it takes time away from my fam­ily to tweak code!  I have bet­ter things to do – don’t you agree?

I want to be able to con­cen­trate on the con­tent of my blog, not fid­dle end­lessly with the raw code.  So how does The­sis save you time and effort build­ing a nice look­ing site?

Here’s how:

• Cus­tomiz­ing the num­ber and size of columns is easy, sim­ply select Columns from the “Site Lay­out” area of the “The­sis Design Options” under the “Appear­ance” menu.  It’s nice that you can quickly change the lay­out of your columns so that you can deter­mine what works in an effi­cient manner.
• Cus­tomiz­ing fonts is also sim­ple, avail­able on the “Fonts and Font Sizes” area of the “The­sis Design Options” under the “Appear­ance” menu.  I like that font choices let you know which fonts are web-safe; that is, they are most likely to be avail­able on a wide range of com­put­ers and less likely to appear dif­fer­ently on users’ screens.
• Teasers – the excerpt of your posted arti­cle that first appears to users – are eas­ily con­fig­ured in the “The­sis Design Options” as well.  Since my blog is fairly new, I have opted to turn off “author name”, “pri­mary cat­e­gory”, and “tags” since these fea­tures are more applic­a­ble when you have more con­tent on your site and you have mul­ti­ple authors post­ing con­tent.  It’s handy to have these avail­able to quickly back on when the time comes – hope­fully very soon!
• It took me a while to fig­ure out the mul­ti­me­dia box, but now that I know what it is, I find it to be really nifty!  The mul­ti­me­dia box gives you the abil­ity to place video, pic­tures, and other mul­ti­me­dia in a promi­nent place on your blog – such as the default top/right cor­ner.    The mul­ti­me­dia box can be asso­ci­ated a post; that is, it can change with each par­tic­u­lar post, but always dis­played in a con­sis­tent man­ner in the same loca­tion on your blog.  For exam­ple, I asso­ci­ated a video of Tim Fer­riss in a recent post by sim­ply enter­ing the embed code in the “Mul­ti­me­dia Box Video” option for my post.  When you view the post, you have the option of play­ing the Tim Fer­riss video in the top/right cor­ner of my blog.
• Like set­ting up the mul­ti­me­dia box, asso­ci­at­ing a thumb­nail image for your teaser and post image for a post is sim­ply an option in the “New Post” screen.  Very convenient.
• Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO)  is the process of mak­ing your web­site more attrac­tive to search engines and thus mak­ing your site “find­able” buy your cus­tomers.  The The­sis theme is opti­mized for SEO since it sep­a­rates pre­sen­ta­tion from con­tent, which search engines love.  So far, I have expe­ri­enced very good search results for my blog, so I can attest to the effec­tive­ness of the The­sis Theme in this regard.  I have def­i­nitely noticed as I post arti­cles that my search engine rank­ing as risen with­out any extra effort on my part, and I haven’t added val­ues to any of the SEO related fields that The­sis provides.
• Sup­port for The­sis is def­i­nitely speedy and reli­able – as soon as I sub­mit­ted two ques­tions on their site, I got answers for both of them within hours.
• Chang­ing your Nav­i­ga­tion is a snap with The­sis. In the “Nav­i­ga­tion Menu” of “The­sis Options” you can eas­ily set up what belongs in your menu and in what order.  It is also very easy to add cat­e­gory pages and addi­tional links to the nav­i­ga­tional win­dow with­out mess­ing with code.  Rear­rang­ing nav­i­ga­tion is a drag-and-drop oper­a­tion.  Slick!
• The­sis lets you cus­tomize your blog by only chang­ing two files custom.css and custom_functions.php.  This makes it not only to cus­tomize, but also you only have to save these files when upgrad­ing to a new ver­sion of Thesis.
• You receive unlim­ited upgrades with The­sis – nice to be able to share in improve­ments in a prod­uct with­out the pain since only two files have to be saved and moved to the upgraded version.

I am glad I made the deci­sion to use the Word­press The­sis theme.  The money spent was well worth it.

I bought the per­sonal option (which only allows you to use it on one web­site), but plan to upgrade to the Devel­oper ver­sion in the near future for my sec­ond blog.  I invite you to try the new Word­press Theme at your ear­li­est opportunity.

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