This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

There’s a lot of talk out there about the ultimate premium Wordpress theme. For many people, that theme has been Thesis, a framework that allows you to create stunning sites. Thesis has a great pedigree, as it’s the brainchild of Chris Pearson, who’s well known for producing easy on the eye, search engine optimized, clean themes including Pressrow, Cutline, Copyblogger and Neoclassical. With those free themes available, why on earth would you fork out $87 for Thesis?

Built In Functionality

One reason is because if you are not technically inclined, you can customize most aspects of your site without touching a single line of code. When you install the Thesis theme, you get two new options in your admin dashboard: Thesis Options and Design Options. Thesis options lets you do things like:

• change the title tag and meta descriptions on your home page
• prevent search engines from indexing archive pages so you don’t get penalized for duplicate content
• add your Feedburner feed URL
• enable scripts that need to run in your header or footer (such as analytics scripts) without touching the core files.
• change display options for widgets, comments, tags, archives, posts, pages and more
• alter post image settings
• and (my personal favorite) edit the navigation menu

Designing Your Thesis Theme

A lot of that is background stuff that your readers may not even notice. What they will notice is the design, and you can change layout, font sizes and more through the design options tab. All of this will give you a great site, without the need to do much more.

Of course, most people want their premium theme to look completely different from the next guy’s, so you can use Thesis skins (many of them free) to start you off with a funky, minimalistic or business like design.

Thesis OpenHook - Code Without Coding

If you don’t mind getting your hands a little bit dirty, then install the Thesis OpenHook plugin. Remember I said that you didn’t have to touch any code? That’s still true. One of the best things about Thesis is that all your customizations are saved in two files: custom.css and custom_functions.php. Keep a backup of these files and you can upgrade your theme without losing the changes you have made - just copy them back into the custom folder when you’re done.

So, back to the Open Hook plugin. Thesis uses hooks (little snippets of code) to change how different aspects of the theme work. The Thesis Openhook plugin lets you change these from your Wordpress dashboard and change them back quickly if something doesn’t work out. Use the Thesis Custom Styling dashboard link to edit custom.css and Thesis Custom Programming to edit custom_functions.php.

Thesis Resources

Even non-techies can use this, thanks to a vibrant community of Thesis users who are willing to share the tips they have found. Resources that I’ve found useful, apart from the excellent DIYThemes support forum, include Sugar Rae’s Thesis tutorials and the list of 100 resources for Thesis theme users on Mattflies.com. Among other things, I have used these resources to:

• color code my navigation menu
• add a tabbed box to my sidebar
• add widgetized footer to my site

Although Thesis seemed a little daunting at first, I soon got used to it and I’m happy with the site I’ve created. And since the personal license is good for use of the theme on two sites, it will take only a short time to customize the next site I use the theme on.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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