Why doesn’t every person use Thesis theme 1.8 if it is so great? There are two very easy answers. The first possibility is that they merely haven’t heard of it yet. The second is that Thesis is a premium theme and costs $87 to purchase. With all the free WP themes available they have to make something pretty special in order to warrant a price tag on it. I had some doubts about the value of using premium themes to begin with, but after using Thesis I can say it’s really worth every penny.
If you are new to the world of search engine optimization the theme will allow you to rank very highly without having to read 10 books on SEO and do in depth coding. If you are an expert at SEO Thesis 1.8 will save you a very large amount of time when optimizing each new article. Probably the best part about the Thesis theme is that once you purchase it, you receive all of their theme upgrades for free from that point forward.
There are a lot of upgrades added to Thesis 1.8 but I wanted to highlight some of the ones I am most impressed with.
- Header Image Upload
One of the burdens many people go through is getting a quality header into their wordpress theme. The new header upload system allows for easy upload of an SEO optimized CSS based clickable header.
- New Google Fonts
Web designers deal with font issues all the time. The truth is that there are only a handful of fonts that are compatible between different browsers. There’s no point in creating outstanding content if it will not render properly when a portion of the people pull it up. The worst part is that the handful of compatible fonts are not exactly the most aesthetically appealing ever created. Thesis 1.8 allows access to Google’s Font Directory with 28 new fonts that are completely web safe.
- Unique Pages
Thesis 1.8 is now built to allow users to add unique headlines and content to every category, tag, or taxonomy page on your website. This is a huge benefit in fixing the duplicate content SEO problem that most WordPress Themes create.
- Favicon Uploader
Favicons are the tiny pictures that show up in the tab above your webpage. It is also shown next to your website name when people bookmark it. It can be a pain to drop an image down to 16×16, upload it into an icon file, and then add the right coding into each page’s meta descriptions. This is why Thesis 1.8 created a system that does all the work for you. All users have to do is simply upload a picture.
- Custom Loop API
This is an incredible tool created for developers to modify the specific content area of every type of WordPress page. It will allow for the creation of extensive custom templates.
- Security
There are multiple security enhancements in Thesis 1.8 that enables the WordPress nonce field as well as an improved data-handling system. In short it will add an overall increase for the safety of your website.
These were just a handful of the upgrades that I felt were important to point out, but there are many other benefits and changes to read about on the Thesis site.
One of the things that intrigued me the most about the Thesis theme is who uses it. There are many very well known bloggers that rely on this platform. The most notable in terms of SEO is Matt Cutts. Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team. This is the man who is in charge of how Google successfully ranks quality websites. He is one of only a few people in the entire world who has actually seen the full Google search algorithm and he uses this theme for his own website.
Other very notable bloggers using WP Thesis themes include:
- Chris Hardwick – nerdist.com
- Danny Sullivan – daggle.com
- Outspoken Media – outspokenmedia.com
- Bill Erickson – billerickson.net
- Matt Armendariz – mattbites.com
As a very open disclosure I would like to point out that the links over to their site are affiliate links. What does this mean? Well if you decide to purchase a theme from Thesis and you arrive there from our website:
- 1.) You will pay the same price you normally would
- 2.) We will receive a small amount of money for being the referrers
- 3.) I will buy my dog Rowdy a brand new bone for being awesome
I would never recommend anything I didn’t believe in. I only have 3 affiliate links on this site; Thesis, BlueHost, and Amazon. All three I currently use and am extremely impressed with.
If you are interested in the Thesis 1.8 WP theme simply click this link to check it out:Thesis by DIYthemes
Brian Rogel is the CEO of Synactable a Marketing & Public Relations Firm in Charleston, SC. Contact him by leaving a message below or tweet him at @BrianRogel
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
I just wanted to chime in and see that I agree with your view on Thesis. I've been using it for almost a year now (as I recall) and just yesterday upgraded to Thesis 1.8 – it really is great!
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Thanks Klaus, the Thesis theme is hard to beat especially for SEO purposes. I've always been a fan, but the upgrade to Thesis 1.8 has me really impressed.
I have really been contemplating buying thesis from a long time. I think it is time to buy it since the 1.8 is out and seems to have added some more great tfeatures
I definitely feel like getting the Wordpress Thesis theme is worth it. It saves so much time for blogging by simplifying the entire SEO process. If you do end up using Thesis 1.8 for your blog, make sure to stop back through and let me know what you think.
I've heard of Thesis before, I know that Nerdist.com uses it.
I use All In One SEO in my wordpress installation but would still like to check out Thesis finally and compare the built-in theme features & plugins between All In One SEO.
You have any opinions on All In One?
Hey Hunter,
If I wasn't using Thesis I would be using All in One SEO. It's by far the best plugin to use to boost search engine optimization. I think Thesis has a slightly more dynamic and user friendly interface. Thesis is very helpful if you don't have an extremely in depth knowledge of SEO, and it's because of this that I use it in the blogging platform of client websites. I want them to be able to excel when they are off and creating their own blog posts. I use Thesis since I want to be as familiar with it as possible and also because I wouldn't want recommend anything I haven't used thoroughly myself.
I have heard a lot of good things about Thesis 1.8. Everyone seems to be loving Thesis yet I think that you don't necessarily need a framework for Wordpress themes. What do you think?
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You make a really great point Julius. It honestly comes down to what level you are on with web design, coding, and search engine optimization. It is very possible to take the original Wordpress framework. and still be able to optimize posts in all of the right areas. It will just take a larger amount of time as well of a more in depth knowledge of PHP and SEO. What is great about Thesis is it takes care of these areas for you in case you are not yet at that level. Thanks for the question.
Hi Brian,
Another bonus of thesis is how easy it is to change the layout. Sometimes when you work with pixel perfect layouts you run into problems. You need to put a 250px wide widget in your sidebar, but the designer made the column 200px wide. In theory you should just be able to go the CSS file and change the two width and everything falls into place.
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The ease of formatting the blog design is definitely one of the best features in the Thesis theme. It is set up perfectly to bounce in and out of the CSS files to make quick revisions. The other plus is since the changes are placed in a separate file it insures that the information isn't overwritten when implementing Wordpress and Thesis upgrades.
I didn’t know about thesis 1.8 but I heard a lot of things on it, then when I read your post. It seems they added some useful features and it is very interesting to use it..
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Thesis 1.8 is a really great platform for running any blog that is targeting search engine traffic. They also do well with the continual updates and additional features.
Though I like a lot this theme, the price was too high for me and I had to settle for a free theme on my blogs. If you have time to browse the websites with free WP theme, you will find a theme you like.
Patel
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Hi Patel,
I have built a lot of blogs on free themes and I've been overly impressed by a few. Site5 really has some gorgeous themes to choose from, and you can still get a lot of SEO functionality by implementing a plugin like All-in-One. Thanks for the comment.
Nice review. I can probably consider changing to this premium Thesis Theme when the blog starts to earn a decent amount of earnings to cover the costs. In the mean time, I'll just satisfy myself with my free theme.
Thats the great thing about themes is with just a little bit of work you can move your blog from one to another. If you ever decide to move a blog to or from Thesis theme, there are a few plugins built specifically to help in the transfer process.
I think you get it wrong Rahul. Thesis is a website framework. If you want to give a unique look to your Thesis powered site then you need to customize it.
i am always read your updated blog,your blog write very well and all of them are about true life!
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If the whole website is in fact a blog, then it would be better to have it linked to the domain name directly. If the whole website contains more than just a blog, then it would be better to link blog.domainname.abc and/or domainname.abc/blog to the blog.
Modern windows are usually glazed with one large sheet of glass per sash, while windows in the past were glazed with multiple panes separated by "glazing bars", or "muntins", due to the unavailability of large sheets of glass.