So, which WordPress theme do you use?

It’s on my mind because today I saw that Chris Garrett, who I’m a pretty big fan of, recently changed his WordPress theme from Thesis to Headway. As noted in Chris’ post about said change he expected this to shock some people, and shock me it did. Chris has been touting the Thesis WordPress theme for a while, and while it was a long time ago, so I can’t say with 100% certainty, I’m pretty sure it was partially his first posts about Thesis that inspired me to use Thesis at my own sites.

Anyhow, so yes, I was surprised. Chris has this to say…

If you don’t want to code or pay someone else to, then I recommend Headway.

What Headway offers is a great theme that you can customise visually. You don’t have to know any of the geek stuff if you don’t want to. Simply drag items around to move them, point and click to change colours, and so on. If you want different pages to have a different look, perhaps different items in the sidebar, you don’t need to add any plugins or know any programming talk.

That actually fits in with what I said in my post about Thesis here at Blogging For A Living. Basically I love Thesis, but what I noted in my Thesis review is that Thesis users along with the Thesis website (to a point), tend to promote how easy this theme is to customize. Thesis was mostly easy for me to customize. That said, I’ve been messing around with blog design and code for a while. I’m nowhere near pro, but I can manage my way around css files, html and so on decently. However even for me there was a learning curve. There were some custom issues I had problems with and if you check out the Thesis forums, you’ll see all sorts of people at every blog design skill level asking questions as well.

In the end what I recommended was this; “If you’re totally new to blog design issues, Thesis may be too hard, and thus not worth the cash. You could stick with a free theme that already looks close to what you want OR pay someone cool to design your custom theme.”

In any case, I’m happy with Thesis and won’t be changing it up, but I figured I’d point you in the direction of the Headway post in case you’re not so geek savvy but do want a rockin’ personalized theme. Also, something to consider. If you do have Thesis and you haven’t been able to make it work as well as you might like, there’s a good plugin that can help – Thesis OpenHook. This plugin is ultra handy and makes Thesis just that much easier.

NOW you tell me – which WordPress theme are you using and why? Is there a theme you adore much more than the two mentioned above?

Oh and in keeping with the Facebook page saga – which by the way, I’m so utterly sick of this week because all of a sudden various clients of mine are like, “HEY we need a Facebook page! Weeeeeee!” right after I had to deal with my own; but I digress. In keeping with my saga here’s how to make everyone on Facebook hate you – try hard not to act like this when people friend or fan you. Good stuff.