The following is a guest review.

You may have heard of this little WordPress theme called Thesis? Well, if you haven’t, you obviously haven’t been reading this blog, so get on board. Thesis finally has some competition in the market in a new WordPress framework/theme called Headway.

Headway is young and has a lot of competition in the premium theme market (Thesis, WooThemes, etc), but there’s already a lot of buzz about the theme and it’s being used by Jay Fleischman, Chris Cree, John Haydon and of course Jason Wietholter (yours truly).

Now, I’m not a WordPress genius like Ben and I’m not an SEO guru either. I know business and I know enough about the web to be dangerous (mostly to myself), which is precisely why Headway (*gasp* its an affiliate link!) has been so incredibly helpful for me.

But instead of continuing to gushing about how it’s the best thing since sliced bread, let me give you my take on the Headway theme.

Design

The “out of the box” layout is strictly text and doesn’t feature any really special features that are offered in the backend. As noted in Ben’s review on Thesis, the same applies to Headway, the title and description are actually text and not an image you have to create, although you do have the option to include an image and it is exceedingly simple.

Flexibility

I’ve not used the Thesis to be able to compare, but Headway’s flexibility is second to none for me. I can redistribute items as I see fit. Create new sidebars and duplicate them across pages. I can even customize the 404 page directly in Headway.

Headway let’s you customize the layout of each page in the Layout Editor. You can add what they title “Leafs” for different types of content, such as: Image Rotator, Featured Post rotator, Widgetized Sidebar, RSS Feed and Content or Text/HTML and a few more. It’s infinitely customizable and each Page or System Page can be customized with a drag and drop layout.

If you move to the Design item in the Appearance tab in the WP Sidebar, you get a plethora of options to re-design everything in your site. There is even the capability to add your own custom.css file or download/share “skins”. However, the Headway community isn’t as big or well-established as Thesis, so you won’t find a lot of shared skins yet.

One more thing. Headway allows you to move the Meta tags for posts and pages around and also has “hooks” for adding content after every post, after the header, before the footer and on and on.

With all the ability you have to customize every single page of your site, Headway makes a gymnast look tight and stiff.

Ease of Use

Headway was extremely easy for me to figure out and use. If you follow the new Headway items in the Appearance tab in the order they appear, you can set up all the options of your site very quickly and easily. Just like with Thesis, you can customize every bit of CSS, but unlike Thesis, there is no PHP to learn unless you really, really want to.

As I stated before, I’m not a SEO or CSS guru, but Headway helped me design a fairly nice site with minimal effort and I got it on the first page of Google in just a few days. While that may not be a big deal for some of you, it is huge for me and I attribute that success directly to Headway’s easy to use SEO options.

Headway features drag and drop simplicity, offers slew of options, and is infinitely customizable. You really get to choose your own level of difficulty, but 90% of the functions are right at your fingertips in the WP Admin pages.

Support

This is hard for me to review as I haven’t had any need to use it. From what I have seen, the documentation is available and there is a forum for users to discuss any issues and share ideas, but I just haven’t needed it. Obviously, with Headway being so young it doesn’t have the same number of users as Thesis, so community support will be lacking in terms of shear size.

Total Rating

I’ve used a lot of themes from designers and theme brokers, but Headway is the first one that really allowed me to get what I wanted out of a theme and I haven’t even scratched the surface of its total capabilities. I mean, take look at my site: jasonwietholter.com. It has no custom.css and I only broke away from the built in options by adding an image as a header (which is arguably, built in) and the image in the sidebar.

In all honesty, I haven’t even scratched the surface of what Headway is capable of and I think you could write a book to cover and thoroughly explain all of the features. I would absolutely recommend the theme.

Note from Ben: We’re going to hold off on giving Headway an official score for now. As Jason mentioned, he’s not used Thesis and despite my best efforts, I haven’t had a chance to really sink my teeth into Headway just yet. So, trying to rate how Headway stacks up against other themes that I have much more experience with (namely Thesis) just wouldn’t be fair at this point.

However, thanks in large part to Jason’s review, I’ve decided to dedicate time in the coming week to getting familiar with Headway. I’ve been wanting to redesign my personal site, Skitzzo.com for a while now and this seems like the perfect opportunity. It certainly sounds like Thesis may have a challenger for the top score on the list so I’ll be sure to let you all know when the final score comes down.

Jason Wietholter is an entrepreneur of multiple businesses online and off, and pretty much as nice a guy as you’d ever want to meet.

You can find him at jasonwietholter.com and lurking around the “internets” on Twitter @jasonwietholter. I’ll vouch for him any day & can promise you won’t be disappointed by the information he provides.

What do LaVar Burton, Copyblogger and this blog all have in common?

We’re all rocking the Thesis theme (and you’d better believe that’s an affiliate link).

Over the last year, Thesis has taken the WordPress community by storm, quickly becoming the premium theme of choice of many top bloggers.

While it certainly doesn’t hurt to have people like Darren Rowse (TwiTip), Brian Clark (Copyblogger), Matt Cutts (Google egineer), and Chris Brogan using and promoting your theme. But, if you know anything about these bloggers (or myself for that matter) you kow they won’t promote a product that they don’t strongly believe in.

So what is it about Thesis that makes it so special? We’ll take a look in our second installment of WordPress Theme Reviews.

Design

The “out of the box” Thesis design is one of the most clean & crisp designs you’ll find.

Thesis "out of the box"

It’s minimalistic look and feel assures your content is always the center of attention.

There’s no denying that WooThemes’ 36 different themes are a more diverse offering out of the box. Their image heavy designs are a stark contrast to Thesis’ sleek default design.

However, Thesis incorporates the site’s title and description into the design so you don’t have to create an image for each new site as you do with Woo.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Flexibility

The flexibility of Thesis is where this theme out-classes every other theme on the market.

With just a click of the mouse you can go from a 2 to 3 column design and move those columns to the right or left sidebars.

Another built in option allows you to use featured posts, post teasers, or a mixture of the two. WPblogger for example doesn’t make use of the teaser function. MLBrumorblog on the other hand, relies solely on teasers. And, as you can see from the screen shots below, those are just a couple of the plethora of options Thesis gives you in the theme dashboard.

Thesis options

Thesis design options

When you begin to consider the added flexibility Thesis offers through its use of custom.css and custom_functions.php files, the possibilities become nearly endless.

Want to add one of those fancy sliders to your home page that WooThemes uses in several of their themes? You can, as proven by Michael Gray on his SEO blog.

Would you like to utilize the 3 column widgetized footers that seem to be all the rage with blogs over the last year or so? Alex Frasier does just that on his young entrepreneur blog. Basically, you can replicate practically any look or feature of other themes utilizing the Thesis framework.

If you have any doubt about the utterly incredible flexibility of this theme, take a stroll through their showcase and check out the amazing diversity.

a sampling of the Thesis showcase

In all honesty, since I’ve purchased a developer license of Thesis, the only reason I’ve found to buy other themes has been this series of theme review posts.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Ease of Use

While Thesis does have a plethora of options to figure out, they are, for the most part, self explanatory.

Now, there is a bit of a learning curve once you get into making serious customizations. But, you’re not really learning Thesis per-say, you’re actually learning CSS and PHP to use within the Thesis framework.

What you learn while customizing your site, is applicable to any site built with CSS. And of course, if you already know CSS and/or PHP you’ll probably find Thesis a breeze to use.

For those of us who aren’t CSS inclined, the free Thesis OpenHook plugin is immensely helpful and, among other things, allows you to make customizations within the WordPress dashboard. Since nearly all the customizations take place in either the custom.css or custom_functions.php file, swapping, sharing, and testing code is incredibly easy.

And, if you decide you don’t want to take the time to learn, there are a growing number of skins (ready made custom.css and custom_functions.php files) available that are easily applied to your Thesis installation to customize the design.

All in all, I would consider Thesis fairly easy to use. You can customize your design with a minimal amount of effort and if you get stuck, there plenty of places to turn for help. Which, conveniently, brings us to our next category…

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Support

Customer support is yet another area where Thesis checks in at the head of the class. The theme of course, comes with a manual to get you started and there’s a very active support forum where every one from beginner to expert congregates to ask questions and help with any issues that you may encounter.

And, if that’s not enough to quench your appetite for support, there are an increasing number of Thesis tutorials that walk you step by step through all sorts of customizations. The tutorials stretch from how to add a header image, to how to create a Gawker type carousel, to using different ads for pages of different topics.

If there’s something cool you want to do with Thesis, chances are there’s already a tutorial for it. And if not, I’m willing to bet someone in the forum can show you how it’s done.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Total Rating

I’ve used countless themes in my blogging career, and even helped design and sell one, and Thesis has an answer for almost every issue I’d encountered with any other theme.

The flexibility is unparalleled and the community surrounding is both knowledgeable and helpful. The price tag isn’t cheap ($87 for personal use, $164 for developer) but there are no monthly fees to remain a member and updates are free.

Look, if it seems like I am falling all over myself to say good things about Thesis, that’s because I am.

It is, quite simply, the best WordPress theme available, coming in at an impressive 9 out of 10 stars.

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars

Since it took longer than promised to deliver the first WordPress Theme Review I’ve decided to review not one, but 38 themes!

Why?

Because that’s precisely how many themes WooThemes has released in their year of existence, with more themes due out each month.

While each theme is unique, they’re all built on roughly the same framework and offer a similar set of options and user experience.

Design

If there’s one thing WooThemes does better than anybody else in the premium theme space today, it’s design.

While some of the themes in their portfolio aren’t quite my cup of tea, they have a wide range of great looking themes. Chances are, one or more will appeal to your personal tastes.

The designs are obviously professional, visually pleasing, and always incorporate post images in stunning fashion. My personal favorites are The Journal, VibrantCMS, and the Gazette Edition, but there are so many quality themes in the club membership that I literally began coming up with new blog ideas just so I can try out some of the others.

A good blog design will inspire me to write more often and several of WooThemes 36 designs do just that.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Flexibility

While they’ve certainly come a long way since I first purchased the Gazette Edition, this is the one category where WooThemes has the most room for improvement.

They have introduced check boxes for several elements in their themes making it easy to turn them on or off. However, moving things around to suite your needs is quite difficult.

Maybe I’m just spoiled by using the Thesis theme so much but I’d like to be able to move columns around, or move an element from the top of the page to the bottom of the page.

While WooThemes make use of a custom CSS file which gives it some added flexibility, it seems that moving elements around requires editing the theme files. While this isn’t unusual, it does make it a quite annoying to upgrade if/when the theme is updated.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Ease of Use

Evaluating WooThemes’ ease of use is a bit difficult since they offer so many different themes. And, while each theme is a bit different, a few common threads emerge across the portfolio of themes .

Installing and activating the theme is a fairly simple process. However, the initial result can be a bit jarring if you’re expecting to see something very close to the demo site featuring your chosen theme.

Brand new blogs don’t have the posts to fill up many of the features and existing blogs may not have post images in place to give the site the visual impact immediately.

For example, the images below are screen shots of the same website, the first with a nearly stock install of Thesis theme and the second with The Journal installed.

a stock Thesis install

a stock install of The Journal

Now, as I mentioned the Thesis options have been tweaked slightly, but the site just looks a bit unfinished or messy with The Journal theme installed. Could this be remedied and made to look amazing with The Journal as the theme? Absolutely, but it does require a bit more effort.

Also, the WooThemes use an image logo in the default install rather than using the WordPress header or site name. That’s not a huge issue as most sites create their own custom logo and just replace the default WooThemes image but I much prefer to go with a relevant text based header as the default.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Support

Support is often the most critical element of a theme and WooThemes does a fairly good job of supporting their vast array of themes.

Each theme is given specific documentation but it doesn’t really provide much information that I didn’t already know. There’s a video that walks you through using each option, and an “Explaining the Theme Options” section that is nothig more than a screen shot of all the theme options. It does absolutely nothing to explain them further.

Thankfully, the rest of the support functionality is better. The Knowledge base offers a list of resolved issues about each theme from the support forums, and if you’re still struggling there are forums where you can ask your specific questions.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Final Rating

Overall, the premium themes produced by WooThemes are better than most themes in the marketplace today.

They’re visually stunning, a bit rigid, and not easiest themes I’ve ever delt with. However, at $125 for a club membership which gives you access to all 36 themes, you’re getting your money’s worth (which is why I feel comfortable making that an affiliate link).

Rating: 7 out of 10 stars

But, how does WooThemes’s 7 out of 10  stack up against the Thesis theme? You’ll have to wait for the official numbers but I’ll give you a hint… the banner under “We Recommend” still belongs to Thesis.

Every so often here on WPblogger we’ll review a WordPress theme, walking you through the ins and outs as well as listing the pros and cons of each.

While reviews are, by their very nature, subjective, we’ve selected 4 core categories on which to score each theme.

So, when all is said and done, you’ll be able to compare several themes against each other and see how they stack up.

The categories are as follows:

Design

The purpose of a WordPress theme is naturally to make your site look good. So, the first and most obvious category we’ll be grading themes on is design.

It’s important to note though, that this category is based on the “out of the box” or stock install design. We’ll get into customized designs in our next category.

Flexibility

While it’s great if a theme looks good right off the bat, thousands of people have probably used the same theme. And, since most of us want our blogs to stand out and be unique some customization is required to make your blog look and feel like your own.

The ease by which you can do that, is what we’re calling flexibility.

For example, a theme that looks great out of the box, but makes it difficult for users to tweak or change settings would be given a low flexibility score. On the other hand, a theme that offers a bunch of options and is easily modified would score well in this category.

Ease of Use

The next category we’ve chosen is “Easy of Use” and is fairly self explanatory.

While some themes offer a whole host of options and settings, you need a text book just to explain what they are and how to use them. Other themes make it a herculean task to simply upgrade to the newest version. Those characteristics in a theme would call for a lower score in this category and probably a special place in hell for the developers.

Naturally, if the theme is very intuitive to use and seems like its developers thought of every problem you could encounter and fixed it before you could worry your pretty little head about it, well we might just give them a perfect grade in “Ease of Use.”

Support

The simple fact of the matter is that if you spend much at all with your WordPress theme, you’re going to run into a problem of some sort of another. Call it the cost of working with an open source platform that has such a diverse group of developers taking it in a million different directions.

So, our final category of “Support” will rank themes on how much help is available to you when you do encounter an issue. Whether the assistance comes from the developers themselves, or whether fans of the theme have created a community to aide fellow users is immaterial to the scoring.

If you can get help when you need it, the theme will score well. If you’re on your own, the theme’s score will suffer right along with you.

Request Reviews

While we already have several of the most popular themes lined up to review, if you’d like us to review a specific theme please feel tree to drop it in the comments of this post, email us via our contact form, or hit us up on Twitter.

Completed Reviews

• WooThemes Reviewed
• Thesis Reviews (coming soon…)

Image by m4r00n3d