One Blogging Tool That Makes My Life Easier

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In the last post, My Blogger Holiday Wish List, I covered some things I wish would change about blogging, however, there are also some tools I’ve found that both work well, and make my blogging world a little nicer. I was going to discuss five tools, but decided to start with one (because it’s a biggie) and later post the other four.

Thesis Theme: I recently decided to redesign one of my blogs and I also launched two new ones. I wanted them all to have a semi-same theme design; yet have unique aspects as well. I tend to use free themes for my blogs and just change the code up to make them unique. However, this is pretty time consuming, especially because WordPress is determined to upgrade all the time, which ends up sometimes messing with my code. I looked and looked and couldn’t find any themes I liked. Then I somehow ended up at the Thesis website. Thesis is a premium theme, and I hate paying for blogging stuff, so it took me a couple of weeks to decide to buy it.

I did buy it though, and I love it.

I’m not up for a full review, so if you want that, I’ll send you to some other places. Last I saw, Chris G’s blog had two posts up regarding Thesis:

Thesis – No More Reasons Not to Buy it

Another Reason to Buy Thesis Theme

OR read these:

A Review of the Thesis WordPress Theme

Improved Thesis Theme for WordPress (Plus a Free Bonus Theme)

My speedy Thesis review:

What I like:

Thesis was easy for me to customize. I managed to do pretty much what I wanted with my blogs using it. Here’s the basic Thesis theme. And if you want, you can see how I made it work for two of my blogs:

• Growing a Green Family
• Green Wedding Slices

You can make the theme look even more custom if you like; I just wasn’t up for too much messing around.

There’s a helpful forum included in the purchase price.

It’s not a bad deal. I think I paid $164 for use of the theme on as many websites as I choose. There’s also a one blog use price. You can later upgrade from a one use license to a full use license for cost which is cool. Sometimes Thesis goes on sale too.

When you upgrade from WP to WP your code doesn’t get all screwy. This theme upgrades seamlessly (so far in my experience).

What I don’t like:

Thesis users reviews and the Thesis website (to a point), tend to promote how easy this theme is to customize, even for newbies to the blog world. I don’t think that’s entirely true. It was mostly easy for me, but I’ve been messing around with blog design stuff and codes for a while. I’m no pro, but I can manage my way around css files, html, and so on decently. If you can’t, and even if you can decently manage like me, there’s a Thesis learning curve. It’s not all cake and flowers to customize your theme. There were a few things I had issues with and if you check out the forums, you’ll see all sorts of people at all skill levels asking questions.

If you’re totally new to blog design issues, Thesis may be too hard, and thus not worth the cash, because you could stick with a free theme that already looks close to what you want. OR pay someone cool to design your custom theme.

On the flip side; Thesis out of the box does look good, it just won’t look like your own blog unless you learn how to fix it up. On that same flip side note, I’m betting you could learn to customize Thesis eventually, so if you want to work at it (you will need to work at it), it’s worth the cost.

If you do get Thesis there’s also an affiliate program you can join. I didn’t join, because I don’t plan on blogging about this anywhere else, or placing Thesis images on my blogs (totally unrelated to my topics), but the affiliate program is a nice offer.

In any case, Thesis made my blogging world a little better, so I thought I’d tell you about it.

Is anyone here using the Thesis theme? If so, what do you think? If you’re not using Thesis how about you tell me if you’ve ever considered using a premium theme.