Thesis 1.8 WordPress Theme Review

It’s a well known fact that within a few seconds web users develop first impressions regarding web pages, thereby leading to the importance of web design. Because I wanted control over my blog’s design, I decided to purchase and switch to the thesis wordpress theme after numerous trials with the free wordpress themes available in the WordPress library. Most of the webmasters who are on the wordpress platform are aware that the Thesis WordPress theme has become one of the most popular WordPress theme in the market and is being used by many top bloggers currently.

For the benefit of my readers and as a user of thesis 1.8 wordpress theme for the last one and a half year.. I wanted you to be aware of the pros and cons of thesis before you decide to purchase it. After all the theme is pricey and does cost $87 for the single use license

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is one of the biggest selling points of Thesis 1.8 WordPress Theme, it’s been developed keeping in mind Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and I gotta agree that Chris Pearson has done a fantastic job at that. This theme makes it very simple to customize your blog post titles, meta description, meta tags and a whole lot more without modifying your code. In short, Thesis gives you every core SEO function with a “no coding needed” after the initial setup. Thesis is very clean and presents your content to search engines very well and with the Thesis theme you no longer need download a separate plugin like All In One SEO or any other plugin to make your blog SEO friendly as these functions are inbuilt into the theme.

Click here to get Thesis WordPress Theme Now

Change the Look and Feel

You can change the look and design of the Thesis 1.8 WordPress Theme very easily. You have the design options which allows you to change the layout (you can go for a 1,2 or 3 column) of the theme without modifying any code. You can also choose where to show your sidebars (right or left) and can alter the widths of the sidebars and also choose to show teasers and featured posts. Adding headers are as easy as uploading a file. Also new in Thesis 1.8 is the ability to use Google’s web-fonts along with sizes of your choice. These fonts are inbuilt into the theme and are safe, secure and stored on Google’s servers and accepted for use on the web which does mean that end users accessing your blog from any device will be able to view your blog without a problem. The theme does offer you a lot of control over the design just with the help of a few clicks and most importantly without the modification of code.

Customization with Hooks

One of the things about Thesis is that when you work with it you have to customize and play with only two files custom.css and custom_functions.php. Every time you modify the theme ensure to take a backup of these files, just incase you go wrong with your coding. Now, I will have to agree that learning how to use these hooks and functions does have a learning curve to it and does take time. I am not a programmer but you can see how I have customized my theme using the thesis framework. The beauty of the system is that you do not have to be a programmer or coder of any sort to understand and utilize the Thesis hook system. If you can cut and paste, then you shouldn’t have any trouble making basic, effective customizations to your theme.

Click here to get Thesis WordPress Theme Now

As an alternative you can also use the Thesis OpenHook to modify your theme via the blog administration panel. Not only can arbitrary HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and even PHP be inserted into any of Thesis hooks, you can also easily remove any of the hooked default elements within Thesis with the click of a button

Other Cool Features

Other features like the ability to add your Google Analytics code directly from the control panel. You can wish to display a  multimedia box as well. Basically, it is a place on your site which you can use to rotate pictures, show YouTube videos, or even add banner ads to your site.. Cool Huh!

Using the thesis theme also reduced my blog loading time by almost half. With my previous free themes, loading time was close to a 7-8 seconds and you can see the difference after using thesis theme in the screenshot from pingdom below. Also, if you’re not aware loading time is one of the critical factors that google considers when ranking your posts in SERP’s.

So that’s it, my review of the Thesis 1.8 WordPress Theme. The support is very good and it has a very helpful community. I hope you found this review useful and this helps you make the right decision. If you’re looking for a good WordPress premium theme that gets you good search engine traffic, great web design and excellent SEO benefits…….. You should Get Thesis now!

One of the biggest advantages of purchasing the theme now is that Chris Pearson is planning to release Thesis Theme 2.0 some time soon and if you purchase the theme now you can get in for $87 (single use license) or $ 164 (Multiple licenses) and get life time upgrades for free.

Click here to get Thesis WordPress Theme Now