Thesis or Headway - Which is best or should we just get both?

I have tried Thesis and I wasn't all that impressed. I haven't tried Headway, but it looks like it will be much more impressive than Thesis. It just appears that Headway seems easier to customize, and with more options. I will be trying Headway soon.

I use Thesis, and I love it.

It's a bit confusing when you're just starting out with it ... but when you get a hold of it, it's an excellent theme. I highly recommend it!


Swastik

I used Thesis. Its good until your good at designing as it comes with bare design. If you are good at design, then go for Thesis. Im not sure bout Headway.

I use Thesis. I haven't used Headway so have no real comparison.

I like Thesis and find most of what you need is easy to do. I am far from being an expert designer but love being able to do the basics myself without having to outsource.

They also have a good support forum as well.

Yes, there are some that allow you to just pop your adsense code in them once and it populates adsense on the site for you.

I just spelled this wrong - but came up with a lot of results: wordpres theme autopopulate adsense

(put that in google)

I use Thesis and love it. You need to spend a little time getting to know it and how it works, but there's an amazing developer community building plug-ins for it, and tons of tutorials for it, as well as the very active Thesis forum.

I'm not sure what beamer1959 means by "Everybody uses Thesis. I find it boring." It is what you make it, you can make it look like a standard Thesis install, or something completely different. The key for me is that it follows sound graphic design principles with regard to grids and point sizes, so you can customize it to your hearts delight and still have a very well-designed site.

I considered Headway, and Frugal, too. Both have their merits. But it was the sheer number of developers and tutorials behind Thesis that swung it for me. As an example, the Open Hook plug-in allows you to customize Thesis' hooks (positions on the page) without having to edit the template files.

Not true. Not all thesis themes looks the same. it depends with the person who is doing the designing and customizing. You can even create static home pages using thesis and still benefit from having the site designed from dreamwever and photoshop.

If you know what you want and have an eye for design, THESIS is your theme, honestly.

If you design your site in dreamweaver, all you have to do is to state your functions in custom.css and you'll be good to go. Use firebug to bring out your site.

I highly recommend thesis theme. The community is soooooo giving and helpful.

Donna, I do take your point about lots of Thesis themes looking the same. That really is because lots of people don't take the time to customise it. I agree that that is strange, given customisability is it's key selling point. Perhaps people buy it expecting customisation to be a step-by-step wizard type system, when in reality it requires a little effort. Once you put in that effort, however, it's well worth it.

I use headway and it's VERY easy to customize without doing any coding at all, which I love it. The "looks" isn't as good as other canned themes such as the Woo Themes (my favorite ones), but much more convenient to customize and tweak.

Thanks everyone for your answers.

It's sometimes difficult to explain what you want when you don't know enough about a particular topic etc.

I suppose what we are looking for is something that is robust, cleanly coded and has good support.

We have over 100 new smallish sites & blogs to crank out in the coming months and we want something that is classy, can be modified and is easy to use once the initial learning hurdles are overcome.

I'm still undecided about Thesis or Headway so any more suggestions will be appreciated.

I am going to call this a Christmas present to myself so will buy one or the other in the next couple of days.

Thanks,

Sam

For those who think Thesis can't be customized or is just cookie cutter sites. Check out this list of sites using Thesis

110+ Thesis Design Customizations You have to See to Believe

I've been using Headway for a little while, and though I must admit I found very buggy at the start, I think it is the superior theme for a designer that doesn't want to end up being a coding expert....You can do great things with it, and with version 2.0 around the corner, it should become much more stable...

I've tried thesis, and though its a very 'stable' theme, it takes a lot more to make it your own...

That's an interesting point Donna... I haven't heard of Flexsqueeze I'll check them out as I was going to get thesis... it does have the support which I like...

thanks for the insight

If you are doing a 'mega-site' a re-coded Thesis works well. I know of some that dumped 6+ months of re-coding into their Thesis base site.

I use the revolution themes at StudioPress.com

I own Thesis and intend to change to another theme despite the financial investment I have already made. The reasons: it does require expertise to use otherwise you get a boring 'me too' site. As this been observed by many others I find the comments refuting that self-evident fact interesting.

Whenever a 'fan boy' club develops (like with Sony's PS3) objective analysis seems to go out of the window. If customer after customer says "hey this is hard" and then leaves their sites un-customized arguing with them is, well, foolish. That's like GM saying to the American public "you don't need no sticken small cars" while watching their market share be lost to Honda and Toyota.

While Thesis excels in SEO and the hook system allows customization I find it impossible to make look good since I don't have the technical skills required. It conflicts with many of the plug-ins I've tried, such as WP-Spire and Total Plugins. To overcome the techinical hurdles there may very well be a "huge base of developers" and a "great technical forum for support." However I have no desire to 1) become an expert on Thesis 2) spend my entire time working on the technical aspects of a site at the ruination of content development, marketing, and running my business in general 3) pay big sums to have Thesis/Wordpress made to work and look good.

Say for example I want to have pages with different looks (example WP Remix: WPRemix Premium Wordpress CMS Theme) for different pages. A two column page here, a one column there, a landing page somewhere, a blog somewhere else. I have no idea how that would be done in Thesis. However I can do that in WP Remix - I simply have to choose the page layout.

I will be checking out Headway because I am desperate to find an alternative to Thesis that both looks good and gives me the functionality I need without requiring a Masters in html or css coding.Thesis' solution is the recommendation to use 'FireBug' a fantastic css/html style debugger. I'd rather have theme that is easy to use.

Headway appears to be the answer: it's visual editor and leaf system is not only much more technologically advanced than the Thesis 'hook' system, but appears to be user friendly to those of us 'technically challenged.' http://headwaythemes.com/features/visual-editor/ has amazing functionality. All of these themes are getting expensive these days. Headway checks in at $200 if you want to remove the footer and use on many of your sites. Anyone know the perfect blend of power, price, and ease of use please let us know. Thanks.

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Update: here are some valuable links I've found. Headway wins handsdown. Thesis fans have posted that 2.0 will have the functionality now available in Headway (namely the leaf add-in ablity and a visual editor) by Q4. I'm not waiting.

http://johnhaydon.com/2009/08/switch...hesis-headway/

http://dannybrown.me/2009/07/31/maki...ch-to-headway/

http://johnhaydon.com/2009/08/thesis-headway-war/

http://www.rowboatmedia.com/399/head...igners-review/

http://successcreeations.com/1314/he...-theme-review/

http://www.zoopmedia.com/headway-wor...tutorial-3161/

I purchased Headway and installed it yesterday. It is simply remarkable, revolutionary in-fact. What Avatar did for movies Headway is going to do to Wordpress.

In Thesis to diagnose css and html issues they recommend you install firebug. Firebug allows you to see what element is being controlled by what html or css code. It also allows you to disable it to see the effects interactively. However it doesn't change Theisis, the stylesheets or coding itself. Once you find the problem you must make the changes manually.

Headway's visual editor is like Firebug on steroids. You select an element and Headway brings up the area controlling the element. You can modify the element on the fly immediatly seeing the results. Positioning, color, attributes all instantly viewed and changeable. This saves countless hours in just not having to "visit the site" after making changes or manually loading style sheets into your editor. Amazing to work with this visual editor!

Part of that interactivity is Headway's leaf function. Like wizards you can drag and drop different elements onto different pages. The leafs have differnt functions (like wizards). Pages can have differnt layouts with differnt functions and purposes, such as blogs vs. landing pages. All by dragging and droppping these leafs where you instannly see the results.

Virtually no technical skill is needed. That said having graphics, color, and typography skill would be helpful (I can't even match a pillow color to the couch).

Until Thesis upgrades to 2.0 there is no question about which one to buy. Headway is amazing, simply amazing - and you don't have to wear 3D glasses. Good Luck...Russ

Headway is like Thesis on steroids
PM avenue girl for her aff link

Haven't tried Headway yet but it looks pretty interesting. I have bought a lot of other premium themes out there and for internet marketing purposes, I've found Thesis to do very well.

Thesis IS pretty technical but in my opinion, all themes are similarly technical assuming you'd like to fully customize it yourself. Once you do one or two sites with Thesis, it gets really easy because you'll have a rough self-template for future sites. You mention having experience developing WP sites so this really shouldn't be a problem.

I'd say go with Thesis for now primarily because they've been around a long time therefore there are a lot of existing documentation to work with (not just customization of the theme but also in relation to getting external plug-ins etc to work which is really important). Their forum is a wealth of information.

**Update**On a side note, if Headway can handle all the functionality you need for your purposes (I've never found this in a single theme before without having to resort to plugins etc) then perhaps it might be a good idea to give it a go. It looks like it'd save a lot of time with its visual editor. Can anyone comment on the documentation/support?

I finally settled on Flexsqueeze after going through a similar process you have gone through that is deciding what will work for me. I had a a dozen or so sites that were using standard free WP templates. I had it down to thesis and flex. I have used many popular plugins with flex and have had no issues with them.

I also like the ability to throw up a real quick squeeze page ...

I will say headway looked tempting and sort of like flex on steroids.

I have tried both Headway and thesis. I use thesis and my mom use headway and i have installed it since she does not know coding... She is so comfortable with the visual editor and the drag and drop... she really likes the simplicity............ Simple ideas make more money than complex ones.... and Headway is the right example for that..

both are pretty good but I'd go for:

Second Multiple Streams Theme on Pre-Order

the pre-order price is gone but its still great value.