I recently installed a WordPress blog for a client and used the Thesis theme from DIYTHEMES. Thesis is a “paid for” theme that is designed to be easily customized — but has SEO optimization built in “out of the box.”
I must confess that I was somewhat skeptical of advertised claims for the theme. But after working with the theme, I believe it to be a real winner.
After the theme is installed, easy to use options are available under the dashboard’s “Appearance” menu. These include both blog layout and design options which make the blog’s look and feel easy to customize.
Out of the box, the theme is elegantly simple in appearance: the blog is quick to load and the content easy to read.
I modified the appearance with a new header image (Figure 1) and new footer text (Figure 2). The header image was created in Photoshop with a transparent background so that it would blend in perfectly with the blog background.
For me, there was a bit of a learning curve involved with these modifications. An online article by Rae Hoffman (otherwise known as Sugarrae), “Thesis Tutorial - Hooks for Dummies,” enabled me to modify the “custom_functions.php” file for the changes I needed. For the few styling changes I wanted to make, I only had to add the necessary CSS code to the “custom.css” file. The core Thesis files do not have to be modified to make theme changes: all changes not made from the WordPress dashboard with the theme and design options can be made with the custom_functions.php and custom.css files.
One of the features of the Thesis theme that is of particular interest to my client is the image rotator (Figure 3). The image rotator is perfect for holding images or image ads. New images are simple to add as they are automatically included in the rotator when they are uploaded to a rotator folder. Alt tags are easy to add from the Thesis Options menu.
I added three widgets to the blog: categories, pages, and search. The categories widget is a nice drop-down box containing the categories to browse. I will use pages and sub-pages with the page widget to achieve an index of pages (Figure 4).
In my own WordPress blogs, I use excerpts for the posts on pages other than the full, single post display. The Theses Options make this easy. Using WordPress post excerpts is a real SEO advantage as it makes possible the use of additional, unduplicated and keyword rich text.
There are many blog design variables that are easy to change using the design options. One of the options is to use a blog layout called “Features & Teasers.” This allows me to show the most recent post as a full article on the home page and several post titles with excerpts below that (Figure 5).
For the preliminary blog design, I am using only two WordPress plugins: Akismet and Bad Behavior. Later, I plan to use other plugins when the site is officially placed online.
Now, I’m going to tell you one of the things I like best about Thesis. Pages generated by the Thesis theme pass W3C validation for both XHTML Strict and CSS! For this, let’s have three cheers for Thesis and DIYTHEMES.
