Saying Goodbye to Free WordPress Themes

I’m in the process of changing this blog’s design, hopefully for the very last time. If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, then you’ll know how many themes I’ve gone through. Too many. For one reason or another, I’ve never been quite happy with the themes that I’ve installed on here, despite my best efforts at customizing them. What frustrated me the most about the themes was that the coding was always different, which meant that I had to spend a considerable amount of time surfing through what looked like a foreign language. CSS and HTML were foreign languages to me for a long time.

I’ve been eyeing Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme for a while. Like many people, I was against paying for a premium theme. Why pay for a theme when you have hundreds available for free? The idea seemed stupid and extravagant. Then again, spending hours searching, installing, and testing the free themes was a senseless waste of time. Then I began reading articles about the downside to the free themes, how the code could actually hurt your search engine ranking because Google has to sort through the gibberish.

So I decided to research Thesis and see what users had to say about it. People had nothing but good things to say about it. Thesis has a great framework for custom design as well as SEO. The latter caught my attention, as I am trying to figure out how to boost my husband’s website (built with WordPress) rankings so that he will gain more business. I read what these people had to say. Then I hemmed and hawed about the price for several weeks ($87 for a single license to use on two blogs, and you have to keep the Thesis link or $164 for a developer’s license and you get to remove the link and have unlimited use).

The cost for the developer’s license wasn’t much more than the price of Artisteer, which I had also considering buying. In the end, I decided that investing in the Thesis theme would be good for both mine and my husband’s business. I installed it on this blog yesterday afternoon, as well as my main site and hit a snag which I was fortunately able to fix. So far, I like what I can do with it, in the basic sense.

I’m not sure how long it’s going to take me to learn Pearson’s “hook” system, which allows you to do all kinds of customization. After reading the tutorial, the process looks straightforward. I’ll let you know how it goes. The only changes I want to make to this blog after this the addition of future books in my sidebar.

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