I intend this to be a internet first – a Thesis theme review without an affiliate link in it. I don’t think I’ve yet seen a 100% impartial review as they are all simply using it as a chance to drop several links to the generous 33% affiliate scheme.

The description of the Thesis theme on its author Chris Pearsons’ site says:

The Thesis philosophy is simple—you can change your design all you want, but you should never change the core code that powers your website. For long-term success in the search engines, it is crucial to serve semantic, information-rich HTML that loads quickly, and optimization and efficiency are two areas where Thesis shines.

We run 100 or so sites on the Thesis theme, and once you get used to using “hooks” to modify the layout it certainly is easy to do. But we have had several clients come to us after buying Thesis, totally confused as to how it all actually works. They had read all the reviews saying its the easiest template in the world to use, and that is just simply is not true.

Anyone with basic html knowledge can edit a typical Wordpress template. When you move over to Thesis you are taken out of your comfort zone. The following “using hooks” part is from a Thesis review by Nicholas Reese:

Using Hooks

For those unfamiliar with hooks here is a quick tutorial on how hooks work.

For take the following function which will print out a header.

<? function show_html(){ ?>
<h3>Here is a Header</h3>
<? } ?>

This header can be output on any of the available thesis hooks. Currently in version 1.51 Thesis has 49 hooks which build upon wordpress’s standard hooks. For example let’s say we wanted to show this header above this post to do this we would use the hook “thesis_hook_before_headline”.

So let’s combine this together.

<? function show_html(){ ?>
<h3>Here is a Header</h3>
<? } ?>
<? add_action('thesis_hook_before_headline','show_html');  ?>

The add action line basically says “at this hook” add “this function.” This example is very basic but you can do all sorts of customizations based on conditional statements.

For an average blogger (ie not a person actively involved in SEO or web design), this is confusing.   Yes, you can spend time and learn it but for a blogger without the skills, time or patience this is a route they may not want to go down.

As aledesma says on the Thesis forums:

I’ll go where the better user experience takes me for the least amount of time put in so I can really concentrate on what’s important – blogging

Many bloggers have no interest in learning useless php skills – they want to spend time blogging, not learning how to set up a blog.

This quote from Brilove on the Thesis forums sums up just how user friendly Thesis can be for novices:

For all of it’s many good points, Thesis isn’t as easy to learn to use is it is touted to be — a quick parse of these very forums will back that up. When masses of people need help to perform simple tasks like adding a header image or changing blog colors it might be a sign that your product isn’t user-friendly to the people who are buying it. Either that, or it is over-hyped and all of those people have the wrong expectations.

This is completely true – looking at the support forums right now there is a far higher proportion of people with simple problems such as making changes to the header that you just wouldn’t have in a “normal” Wordpress theme support forum.

I don’t want this review to sound overly negative – Thesis is a great theme, but certainly not for everyone like a lot of the (affiliate pushing) reviews that have been published would have you believe.

If you want to develop a lot of sites using one theme that can each be modified to look drastically different with a bit of practice, Thesis is an excellent option.

Similarly, if you want to build one high value site and have the time, skills and patience to learn it, again its a good choice. As an example here, I love Rae Hoffmans implementation of Thesis.

However if you are a blogger with one site, and no desire to have to learn new skills, or are short of time, I would seriously consider something far easier to use out of the box, like Woo Themes.

If you want to buy the Thesis Theme, you can do so here.

Martin Adams

Searchengineoptimisation.org