User reviews on best wordpress frame work

11 replies
I have been looking at three different wordpress premium packages,

1. Thesis
2. Genisis, Studio Press,
3. Socrates

All of them have good reviews all seem to claim an advantage for SEO

I would love to hear from some actual long term users who are using one or more of these three options.

Right now I am leaning toward Genisis but Thesis is also compelling.

Socrates, is not a good fit for my needs but version 2.2 is apparently going to be 3.0 compliant, so perhaps that will be a good option in the future.
#frame #reviews #user #wordpress #work
  • Profile picture of the author Abledragon
    I'm a long term user of Thesis and use it exclusively for all WordPress sites I build, both for myself and for clients.

    I haven't bothered to learn Genesis because, quite simply, Thesis does what I need and I know it. I have neither the time nor patience to learn another system.

    To get the best out of Thesis you do need to know CSS and some PHP, so you can maximise the design and layout possibilities. But once you've got on top of those you have maximum flexibility.

    The nice thing is that if you screw it up you can just delete what you've done and you're back to the the start again - with everything still working. Even if you get a fatal error as long as you can access your custom functions file via FTP you can just delete what you did and everything will work again.

    WRT SEO I'm sure that there's little, if any, difference between the top line frameworks. In fact I'm pretty sure the same goes for the design flexibility.

    Again, in my case, it simply comes down to the fact that Thesis does what I want it to, I know it, and I don't have the time or inclination to get to grips with another system.

    There's some more stuff on Thesis here in case you're interested:

    Thesis Theme for WordPress | Create an Awesome Home Business

    I hope that's helpful but by all means let me know if I can clarify anything.

    Cheers,

    Martin.
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  • Profile picture of the author Tim Franklin
    Thanks for the thoughtful review, I appreciate it, nice work on the site too,
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  • Profile picture of the author mattbaehr
    I really like WooThemes. Great customer service and an easy to use theme control panel.
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    • Profile picture of the author Enfusia
      Having used Thesis I was still looking for a little more.
      I wanted to build sales pages, squeeze pages ect within 30 min tops ect.. and build out regular posts ect at the same time.

      I found the builder theme by these guys to be good iThemes : Business WordPress Themes Since 2008 (not an aff link).

      Thesis is very good and a friend has Socrates so I played around with it a little. It's ok but of the ones you mentioned I think it would be thesis.

      You can check out builder too and see if that will fit your needs even better.
      Patrick
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  • Profile picture of the author Tim Franklin
    Thanks for that, I am happy to have a look at any premium SEO options, it is part of a larger project to testing out some SEO plugins I am working on,
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  • Profile picture of the author light_taurus
    After doing some research i have chosen to go with Genesis. I like that they offer future themes(if you buy Pro Plus All-Theme package), provides useful plugins(like SEO Data Transporter) and is backed by Copyblogger. I have bought Pro Plus All-Theme package using discount code, so it really was a great deal.
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  • Profile picture of the author commerce cat
    Thesis and Genesis are both great themes, both have great SEO reputations but there are some fundamental differences.

    Genesis has little in the way of easy design options built into core. Instead it uses a system of child themes - and there is a great selection of them (ages ago I invested in the All Themes bundle and now get all their new child themes for free which is just brilliant). If you see a child theme that you like then this will save you a lot of time customising your blog. The disadvantage to this is that your blog won't look as unique as others will be using the same child theme. You can customise it but you may need to go straight into the code. A child theme may come with design settings (e.g. the Prose theme gives you quite a few design options) but more often, it won't.

    One thing that I really like about Genesis is that it has a lot of widgetized areas as standard - including one in the header. You can add these in Thesis but you need to modify code. Also Genesis comes standard with breadcrumb options.

    Thesis doesn't come with child themes as part of its package (though there are developers who make Thesis skins) but one of the best things about Thesis is that it has really well though out and very easy to use design options. It's really easy to quite radically change the look of Thesis through just fiddling with the design options. There is even a built in colour picker to make things even easier! Thesis also makes it really easy to add a header with a built in panel (it will even let you know the optimal width).

    For example, here is an example of the options to change columns in Genesis:
    Attachment 6774

    And here are the options in Thesis:
    Attachment 6775

    But to get the most out of both themes (just like Abledragon mentioned earlier), you need to be comfortable working with CSS and PHP - or at least learning more. It can be a bit of steep learning curve but once mastered, you'll be able to churn out unique looking, SEO loving sites for all your future projects.

    I've worked with Thesis for a long time now and recently wrote a 400+ page ebook on how to customise it so I'm obviously a fan... There's a real solidity to the Thesis framework that I appreciate as a developer. Chris Pearson is a brilliant designer and all Thesis upgrades are free (as are updates for Genesis) so I'm pretty excited to see what the future will bring. Genesis is newer and it has a lot of amazing potential too.

    Fortunately, both Thesis and Genesis offer 30 day money back guarantees so there's little risk in trying them to see which is better for you.

    Good luck and let us know what you ended up going with!
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  • Profile picture of the author Tim Franklin
    @light_taurus thanks, this is harder than I thought, there are really a lot of great choices.

    @ commerce cat Thank you for your introduction and feedback, I think I may have to look at two purchases, so now its between,

    Thesis and Genesis, and iThemes,

    I like raw code over just looking at options, some options would also be cool, but my main goal is to find the best frame work for over all SEO value, raw organic traffic is what I am after, thanks for the great reviews, I am really impressed with the information.
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  • Profile picture of the author Tim Franklin
    Interesting, looks like they might be using ajax nice interface, now I have to go back and compare them all and see which one to get, nice options this is going to be hard to choose, thanks for that info.
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  • Profile picture of the author DigiSumo
    I a big fan of the Headway themes framework. Awesome visual design editor.
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