debtfreehispanic

I would have to give this title to Thesis. There is a learning curve for open hooks but it is worth it since your customizations will go with you when you upgrade.

debtfreehispanic

Plus there is a cool feature that lets you add a "no follow" tag to your post or page if you wanted to. The style is clean and easy to use.

Dellco

How much does Semiologic cost? The last I heard was $300...and I think the price went up?

Semiologic might be good for SEO, but the appearance needs improvement. You could recognize a Semiologic theme a mile away...

Matt James

Wait until you see Semiologic Reloaded.

I think it's this Friday there'll be a beta of Semiologic 6 with WP 2.8 released - should be a beautiful thing indeed.

TelegramSam

On the whole I understand and agree with what you are saying.

But well written html code (an seo friendly theme) is important for the search engines.

It is one of the basics, along with keyword research, compelling copy, a great offer and links etc.

One piece of the puzzle so to speak. Without it you are definitely making it harder for yourself.

malcasid

What does semiologic look like? I don't even see an example on their sales page?

WareTime

+1000!

What sort of arrangement shall we place the deck chairs in? Oh, that gash from the iceberg, we can get to that later.

Here is a test. Do a search for "roses" one of the most competive terms there is. How many of the top 10 even use wordpress? How many look as nice as wordpress and a nice theme? It's content and links that got them where they are, not a theme or on page optimization.

When picking a theme for a site, I pick something customizable/maintainable and something I don't see everywhere as much as possible. One of my best performing sites right now is so ugly you can't believe it.

As Craig said most on page seo factors are all but dead because of over optimization by everyone. Meta keywords don't matter. Description does slightly because sometimes it's used in the serps and you can make it more of a call to action to generate the click. The title of the page is probably the single most important thing. Forget about h1, h2 etc rocketing you to stardom.

Learn to write good original content and don't put it on the article directories. You'll get links that count.

ebuyer123

What is the best wp themes...

WP Premium THEMES - THESIS Vs. FRUGAL - The Winner Is...

Any comments?

INFOSEEKER-2009

Professionally Speaking ...

I would go with "Gabfire" Themes: Newspro, Advanced-WpNewspaper or even their new one ... BlogPro ...

Gabfire Themes are highly customizable: Adsense ... Affiliate ... Clickbank .. whatever your preference ... You can optimize your site very effectively for advertizing by the use of default widgets and text widgets ...

bigdaddy

I am a big Semiologic fan. I use it on 5 different blogs. Someone mentioned that it breaks every time WP has an upgrade. This is not true. I have been using it for over 2 years and never had an issue.

I am using the bleeding edge version of the Semio reloaded at Alex Jeffreys Coaching - A Student's Journey for those of you who want to see what it looks like. I have done nothing to customize the way it looks. This is straight out of the box.

If you have a custom header made you can improve the way it looks. I prefer the clean and simple look rather than flashy. My blog is mostly to provide content. I have talked to several SEO experts about Semiologic and you can't go wrong when it comes to SEO.

ebuyer123

Will your customizations go with you when you upgrade your Thesis Theme?

Zumba

This is my first post and I wanted to personally thank Daniel Molano for inspiring me to try the Semiologic WordPress theme.

After reading the posts in this section I decided to give Semiologic a try. Although, it is a bit pricey at $299 so far I believe it's well worth the money. I converted my website from a Brian Gardner WordPress theme, that was by the way using all-in-one SEO; to the stable version of the current semiologic theme.

My results so far have been spectacular. My website is about my Zumba fitness business. I use the website as a resource for my customers, to generate leads for my Zumba classes and to sell affiliate products through commission Junction, click bank, Amazon.

Here's my results so far:

• For the key word "Zumba" I was buried, currently I am on page 2. (Number 18)

• "Zumba" currently has 2,580,000 exact search results

• Global traffic for this keyword using the Google external keyword tool is: 450,000 per month (global search results) local results equal 246,000 per month.

• For Zumba New Jersey I'm currently number three on page 1, for Zumba NJ I am also on page 1 number three.

There are other keywords that I rank very highly for all page one results but the Main keyword that I decided to target was Zumba.

I recently purchased both Paul's and Angelas back links and have begun creating back links to the site so in short time I expect to be on page 1 for Zumba. This has worked out quite well for me since recently I received a e-mail from the corporate offices of Zumba complementing me on the quality my website. In fact, I have also received solicitations from other websites who want to purchase banner advertising on my site.

Bear in mind that the website was already one year old and had content on it before I converted it so it's not a brand-new website. However, merely through the use of the semiologic theme, it's over 65 plug-ins, and utilizing a silo structure as recommended by Semiologic, I am now on the Internet map.

My website traffic has increased by over 400% and it's just starting. So once again if you have not tried the semiologic theme give it a try. Thanks again to Daniel and other posters.

MIB Mastermind

I use the flexx theme and find it great. I have never used thesis so I can't comment, but I have used semilogic and find flexx to be better.

Hoped this helped.

Innercore

Hi
Iam using flexx and flexibility themes.Both are not behind the thesis theme but you have to put them in the front mainly flexibilty theme.You can create a squeeze page on the fly with flexibilty.I think this is lacking in thesis theme.
In my opinion, flexsqueeze(flexibility theme) is the best at present other than affiliate theme for both Affiliates and for Personal use.

At this moment,Iam using one of the WSO + flexibility for an amazon product.
The WSO product is for reaching google page 1 with amazon product within short span.

Iam testing it.

Zumba

I wanted to do a quick update on this semiologic versus other WordPress themes.

Recently it seems Google is slapping affiliate websites. In doing the research to determine if this is true or not I found a post at Perry Marshall's website. It seems that Perry has switched over to WordPress platform. Which one is he using? Oh my it's "Semiologic!"

Of course he is using a custom theme and he is not even using the most up-to-date format for semiologic. He is using version 5.7.1. Semiologic is now at 6.0 which has recently been released for WordPress 2.8.1 So it seems that a lot of people in the know use a semiologic theme. Anyone ever heard of "Michael Campbell?"

His blog is on a semiologic theme. Anyway I just thought I would add some factual information to this thread since it seems that most people are just adding opinions!

salonmar

WOW! Craig, Thanks for taking a risk~ Your message is well received.
Deborah P.

kyhawk2

I like flexsqeeze and free seo plugin by jeff johnson

game

I use thesis.

Denis de Bernardy

I've been sent here by one of my customers who suggested I should dispel a few misleading and invalid points on Semiologic Pro, or how it compares to Thesis.

Never heard of Semiologic, but when I clicked on your link it went to a sales page rather than something substantial to show us what it can do. Can't really see what this theme is capable of by their sales page and I don't see any links to see the theme in action.

Semiologic was the very first Premium WordPress bundle to hit the markets. It was released way back in 2005. It has been evolving ever since.

It's a bundle, comprising of:

• The latest version of WordPress
• A theme I authored (currently two, but it's transitional)
• 50-70 plugins depending on the version, most of which I authored

It is NOT a premium theme, even though it frequently is compared to such. The theme itself is free, and and anyone who wants to try it can download Semiologic Reloaded in my site's software section.

Semiologic was good a few years back...now I just find it clunky.

Not that semio is bad, but WP has come so far since it first came around.

You ought to check out the stuff in Semiologic Pro 6, after I redo the sales letter.

Semiologic is an eyesore.

Indeed. But not Semiologic Reloaded.

Plus, that's probably besides the point. What makes Semiologic Pro valuable isn't the theme, which is free. It's the plugins and the fact that it's maintained as a package. Heck, you can use Thesis with Semiologic Pro. Several of my customers do that, in fact. But they still stick to Semiologic Pro to get the goodies.

(...) Semiologic 4.3.7 by Denis de Bernardy

You'd definitely want to upgrade that site. Not so much because the theme has evolved from 4.3.x to 5.x and now to 6.x. But because your site is running WP 2.3 or whereabouts. The latter had some security issues that are being exploited by link spammers.

By the way, one of the most valuable aspects of Semiologic Pro, imo, is the maintenance. A few hours ago, for instance, I updated the zip so it includes WP 2.8.3.

This might surprise you, as the latter has yet to be released. And yet, it's in there in the 2.8 branch; and its release is due shortly. I would know this better than premium theme developers: In the WP 2.8 cycle, I closed hundreds of tickets in the WP bug tracker; I'm not even sure a single one of them contributed as much as a bug report.

Semiologic was very good but went through a lot of problems with a potential sale of the business and the wheels really seemed to fall off. I could not justify renewing after that experience although it does seem to be getting back on track now.

Yeah. It was a big mistake on my part. I learned a few things the hard way, too. Things are definitely back on track, though.

One point in favor of Thesis is that it doesn't touch core WordPress code; Semio (at least the last version I saw) did. To me, that's a terrible no-no.

I'd like to correct that statement, because it's terribly misleading. The only times I ever touch the WP code base in Sem Pro is to fix bugs that are committed in the current WP branch but yet to be released in the wild.

In other words, my customers are currently running the latest in the 2.8 branch, complete with the security patches that were committed to it in recent days.

In the past, I'd modify a file here and there to fix a non-committed bug, but I've found it more reliable in the long run to push to get the patch into WP directly. It's easier to maintain for me.

What a waste of time it is even thinking about a theme being the best for SEO.

New people to IM are now being trained to think this is so important.

I'm agreeing 100% on that. It's nuts to let people think a theme alone will do their SEO. You need plugins on top. I'd suggest my own plugin does a better job at it than the All-In-One, but that's a separate topic. And of course, you need good content. You'll get nowhere without good content.

Adding to this, I feel the "SEO tricks" field is a dying one. As a result, the focus in Semiologic Pro, since 2007 when I started to foresee it coming, has been a lot less SEO than it has been navigability, ease of use, and (in this release) visitor conversion. To give you an example, some of the meaty items in Sem Pro 6.0 are:

• Google Analytics
• Mediacaster
• Ad Manager
• Newsletter Manager

I'm sure a few are thinking. "So what? There are other, similar plugins that do the same." Well, no. Google Analytics integrates with the other three in such a way that, for instance:

• When a user starts/stops/completes your video, you know
• When a user clicks on an ad unit, you know how many times he did and where he came from before doing so
• When a user visits your site and exits on an AdSense ad, you can tell exactly how much you made and where he browsed before he left
• You can also know how many dollars each of your pages is generating. This occasionally gives very interesting insights.
• When a user signs up to your mailing list using my newsletter manager plugin, you can tell exactly where and where from
• Once a user is signed up to your list, he gets segmented automatically. So that in your GA stats, you can tell exactly what those segmented users are doing, as opposed to remaining visitors

And then, there are more toys planned this year on this front, too. Namely cross-domain stats, shared stats with affiliates, and multi-variate testing features.

The point is, it's useless to have visitors on a site if they're not converted properly. I would know this a lot better than most would think -- because my own marketing sucks hard, and I'm savvy enough in marketing to know it is and why. (But I'll be rewriting the sales letter this month, complete with videos.)

Semiologic, as someone already said, (...) breaks every time there is a Wordpress upgrade.

But then, you give it a shot. Maintain a 60 plugin bundle, and see how long it keeps working as WP upgrades occur. It's a lot harder than it looks. Most people don't realize that, until they learn it the hard way.

It's really a full time job. When you're using Semiologic Pro, it becomes my full time job, rather than yours.

I've been setting up a fair number of blogs over the past few months and have tried quite a few "premium themes" including Brian Gardeners, Elegant Themes and several others, all of which I liked. This is the first time I've ever seen Semilogic mentioned anywhere...

The likely reason is twofold:

• You were looking for a Premium WP theme, whereas Sem Pro is a WP bundle. Or as Steve and Daniel put it, a platform.
• I spend a lot more time helping out with WP and maintaining my plugins, than they do on maintaining a mere theme; so they've lots more time than I do to spend on marketing.

Fact is, Semiologic isn't getting much attention, especially lately, as I've spent about zero time on marketing since 2005. As to:

Thesis has a very active support forum and people are ready and willing to help you with any problems you may come across.

Yes, but then, look at what you're needing support for. If my memory serves me well (my limited knowledge of Thesis comes from running across a few howto posts related to it), you're editing php template files, and/or a custom.php file or whatever it's called on their end -- and lots of questions creep up about both points.

For the record, that same feature was initially introduced by Semiologic (we do a lot of things first) in its earliest days. And it was obsoleted in 2007, in favor of an entirely widget-based template (and yes, we were the first to do that too), because I ended up finding the initial approach was far too complex for my user base.

Thus, it's great if you're getting superb support. But you possibly wouldn't be needing this support if you had stuck to a free theme that had set the standards on this front.

Will your customizations go with you when you upgrade your Thesis Theme?

Yes, they will.

Now, be on the lookout, too. Watch Premium theme devs copy what I did in Sem Reloaded to work around theme upgrade problems. Here as in many other places, Semiologic leads the way.

Denis de Bernardy
Creator/Owner of Semiologic

Matt James

Great post Denis.

I've used Semiologic Pro for the past 3 years and will continue to do so...

Steven Bruce

For those that are familiar with the systems, how does Semiologic compare to firepow? There seems to be some similarity. Thanks.

cctravis

Every single day I like Thesis more and more. Such great customization with the open hook system. Thesis makes my life much easier and makes me enjoy what I do more.

Instructor

Dennis, how about a WF discount?

Denis de Bernardy

I'd rather avoid, to be honest; at the end of the day, that means putting my own time at a discount.

D.

Denis de Bernardy

I'm watching/listening to the video as I write, but that one seems more like a tool to mass-generate content for you. So, not much in common.

Instructor

Is there an active forum and detailed how-to's?

Denis de Bernardy

Active forum, definitely; detailed howtos and videos are what I'll be working on this month. The plugins have been so massively updated recently that whatever documentation there was on them is rather obsolete. And I need to update the sales letter.

Instructor

So is it just as easy to use the Semiologic Plugins package with say Thesis, Flexibility, Revolution 2, etc as it is to use with the Semiologic Theme?

Also exactly when could we expect the new howto's to be available since the current one's appear to be obsolete?

Finally, can you send me a feature list for Reloaded 6.X?

drnet

Well, After a long time away, I am back with semiologic based on the post Dennis made above.

I have a long history with wordpress and my early days were spent inside the authority site center which had a tweaked out version of semiologic and it was fantastic back then.

Yes, Dennis did step away from this and it got stale. But after spending a few minutes back inside and loading up the new version, I am VERY excited and impressed with how far he has already brought it back.

Dennis is brilliant with wordpress and now that his heart and soul are back in it, so is mine. The platform used to be the best on the internet by far if you were using wordpress. It was very superior in the sense that he designs this not only for traffic, but the current version is tweaked with a custom CSS system so you can make it look however you want.

On top of that, Dennis understands SEO, but now he has a strong focus on conversion. Whats the sense of getting traffic if it doesnt covert?

So It will be interesting to see where my sites go as I began the conversion process over to his system.

If it is as good as it used to be, this will be a homerun as far as I am concerned and I can get back to focusing on one system that is proven to outperform the rest.

Thanks Dennis for Coming Back Stronger than ever.

Dr Net

venusaffiliate

Can someone tell me: if I am relatively new to building websites and have built a blog with wordpress so far but haven't fully learned how to use wordpress , would semiologic be too complicated to learn to use to build my websites? or does it make sense to use it and learn to build websites with it rather than just learning wordpress?

Thanks,
Susan

dmderoeck

Hi Susan,

Most every theme uses features, plugins and seem to have their own idiosyncrasies to deal with, some more than others.

If you've used Wordpress and enjoy learning, there is no reason why you can't learn any theme. I like using premium themes because of the added support. When you get hung up on something, you can ask people that have used and know the theme for help/suggestions.

Studiopress has an excellent forum and highly recommend their themes. I have never used Semiologic.

Dan

TPFLegionaire

I am interested in buying the semiologic package....Can someone entice me with some great bonuses for buying through their affiliate link?

hint , I need traffic and articles...

Let me know what you can do by PM

Many thx

fordannycool

Hi,

Just go to my site order it through the banner in my top wide sidebar and I will link back to your website besides I could give you great deals for some plug-ins you may needs as well as articles tips, etc... please, if interested check my blog: daniel-abelcoindre.com

Just to let you know Denis de Bernardy does not allow us to give any discount on his Semiologic pro package but any others options are opened for articles, plug-ins, and others bonuses, etc...

also you can contact me privately at: fordannycool at gmail dot com

Besides I will help you to get traffic as well as unique articles and so one...

Hope that will help,

Danny

TPFLegionaire

Ah! Thanks for that , I will visit over the weekend and let you know if there is a deal to be made, I need to spend a bit of time with the free version and understand exactly what I get with the Pro...My main concern is reselling a site with the Theme and plug-ins...

Can I do that?

Cheers,

TPFLegionaire

quick question for you all using semiologic

Has anyone of you tried building a "conduit method " site with it?

thx

KDStyle

I using Arclite WP theme. This theme is simple but greater for everybody who wants full control of their posts, pages and CSS styles. Thesis is good, but Arclite is better

markshields

For my blog which you can see the link for in my signature I used Flex Squeeze and I would say I got a pretty good theme out of it and would reccomend it

Wintermute

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Atahualpa theme, many people consider it far more customizable than Thesis (and it's 100% free).

Denis de Bernardy

I'm an inch from releasing a release candidate, and my next step is docs and videos, so your best bet here is to follow the semiologic.com blog for two or three weeks to actually see what's in there.

The license, is the following: you can create any number of sites using it. Provided they're for your own use. Your API key entitles you, and you only, to updates and support. It does not entitle the same to your customers, to whoever you sell your site to, etc.

In other words, if you resell a site created using the software, it's in the new owner's best interest to get updates and support as well, and he should get a license -- typically through your affiliate link.

D.

PS: Given the surge of security related releases in past years, "it's in their best interest to get it" should really read as "they'd be nuts to not get it". Hacked sites are hard to fix; and I mercilessly charge my hourly rate when I deal with that sort of thing -- on top of the license.

Lance K

Denis,

Can SP be used on client sites? How much more does it cost to be able to do that? Thanks.

Lance K

Denis is back in charge now.

Lance K

Steve, what hosting service & plan do you use for your Semio sites? That's one of the problems I had in the past. And it wasn't a $4.95/month plan either. I'm just not techie enough to know exactly what to look for when planning to use Semio. Thanks.


Excellent point.

Denis de Bernardy

Resellers are expected to get a full license for their customers. Two points to keep in mind here.

The first is, reselling Sem Pro is not anything comparable to, say, reselling a premium theme. The latter can be sold by designers at a heavily discounted price. It's no big deal, since once the site is delivered the end-user never shows up asking for help to the designer or the theme dev. Users of a platform, by contrast, show up in the forum for help (and rightly so).

As a result of this, clients of clients require nearly as much attention as clients; and provided that one cares about building a long term relationship, a $50 software client requires nearly as much attention as a $500 software client. (For large firms such as Oracle, add three zeros to the figures.)

I've a few arrangements with some resellers who do some volume, whereby they get a private link that slashes their affiliate commission out of the sales price.

James Schramko

I use many developer themes and my favorite is Thesis.

Semiologic is awesome and very powerful but the design is lacking.

James Schramko

My IM blog (which is often ranked on page one of Google for the term Internet Marketer) is a semiologic blog with a new Wootheme + custom skin so I hear ya!

TPFLegionaire

Hi Dennis .

Thanks for clarifying these things for me, you and Dany have done an outstanding job in putting your point across, I have just signed up via Dany's link and I look forward to let my webmaster loose with the package.


Basically the plan will be to deploy Semio logic across a few selected sites and integrate it with WPRemix Premium Wordpress CMS Theme theme and develop them into conduit sales friendly sites.


I trust that we will find answers to whatever questions and issues we may have via the forum and support.

now...I don't suppose you have a plugin that will dump Chris Rempel's affiliate intel data into the Semio platform and automatically generate all the optimised pages? Ho! and if you do does it have a big red button marked" press here to make money"?


Just kidding...We'll get to work with what we got.

Many thx.

ZhenyaNoble

......I'm still trying to get an understanding of the whole thing.

Blogs are free, hence wordpress.

So thesis, flex and others are "themes" ...which are??? like skins? Or moreso editable skins, so you can customize how your site looks (which is needed if you don't like the templates provided by wordpress for free). Is that right?

But semio is more of a platform? So customization PLUS. With that plus being what??? The plugins? If so, what do the plugins do, and how do they differ from thesis plugins?

Is there a site at all for semio skins so or the control panel? Sample sites?

$life

I dont think so...

john_kennedy

Search google for:

and you'll get quite a few sites made with the latest version of Semiologic. For a link to the website scroll back up to post 106 and check the links in the siggie. That poster is the creator for the product.

I don't use it, can't afford it right now, but would if I could!

John

LarryVan

I am a contributer and Moderator on the Semiologic forum.

If you like the Flexx theme and Semiologic, you might be interested in the Semiologic skin that I created that visually replicates the Flexx Professional Theme. I say visually replicate because it retains the complete Semiologic structure and all Semiologic plugings can be used.

All content is placed within the widget area just as Semiologic. An additional plugin for a drop-down menu was added because Semiologic does not have one.

A screenshot is attached. The site is not yet live, so a link is not available.

Larrry

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