I’ve used the same Ocadia theme on my blog for 4 years and to be honest it was looking rather tired. Apart from anything, it was very thin! One of the reasons for this was that 800×600 resolutions were still quite common 4 years ago. They’re not any more and I wanted something wider (steady!). I’ve popped a picture up of what it used to look like below. I hope you’ll agree that it’s a big improvement.
In fact, that’s the first thing that my new Thesis Theme fixes for me. The old theme never handled floating images properly and I always had to manually edit the HTML to get images to align left or right with wrapped text. There are several other cool things I discovered about Thesis too, in no particular order:
- Thesis makes changing how your blog looks sooo easy! Whilst some basic coding skillz (to manage the hooks) are useful, it’s certainly not need and any novice can very easily customise the look and feel of their WordPress blog with ease.
- I no longer need the Canonical URL’s plugin as Thesis handles these automatically (canonical urls are a way of telling google how to handle the same content on different urls, that inevitably comes with having a WordPress blog).
- I no longer need the SEO Title Tags plugin, as that functionality comes out of the box too. Although having to manually migrate to the new Thesis title fields was a slight pain.
- I no longer need the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin, as Thesis handles that automatically too.
- That’s 3 plugins I can get read of, which can only increase the speed of the site, which is something else I’m hoping to see an improvement on.
- Thesis makes it easy to migrate from a development / test wordpress blog, to live, through the ability to export and import all the Thesis options. That’s very useful.
- Having post Teasers on the home page is lovely! 🙂
- The Multimedia box has some interesting possibilities, I look forward to experimenting with that.
- It automatically highlights my comments with a blue background, which is very nice.
- The Thesis support is awesome! Because it is a premium theme, there are lots of people prepared to put time into supporting it and so far I’ve found 5+ answers already on the web, for every question I’ve had.
I could go on but won’t. All in all, I’m very pleased with the way it’s turned out. It’s taken me about 2 days to get it installed on a test site, sort out the layout how I want, do all the customisation and changes I wanted, fiddle with plugins settings, do a backup, test the migration process and deploy it to live (having spent 15+ years in IT, I’m super cautious these days!). I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with Thesis, and if I ever had to do another blog, I’d definitely start out with it.
However, there’s always the chance that I’ve mucked something up, or something has broken. So if you spot any problems, please do comment below and I’ll get them fixed pronto. Enjoy!
Oh finally, when I was redoing the AdSense code (Google Ads on this blog) I enabled image ads for post pages like this (you may see one below, or you may see a text ad, it’s Google that decides what goes there). I’m hoping they won’t be too intrusive, but if you get annoyed by them, do let me know. The reason they are there is simple: the very meagre revenue they generate (literally pence per day!) pays for the hosting of this site at the end of the year. If I ever get rich enough to not care about the odd £100, I may well take them off, lol!
