I’ve been an avid WordPress user since I started blogging. This is due in part to the large user base, ease of installation and use, and the cost of software (Free!). Like a lot of people, I was excited about WordPress because of all the free custom themes available. I confess I have spent way too much time playing around with new themes I’ve found. But you have to be careful about what you download or you could end up with something unpleasant.
As a website designer, I created websites for others, but I just had a hard time finding the time to get my own blog up and running and after a lot of work, I wasn’t happy with the free theme I had chosen, in spite of all my customizations.
I had already seen a lot of positive reviews about the Thesis theme and had considered it early on, but I hadn’t wanted to pay for a theme [horror!] — yet. Only after spending a bunch more time working with other themes, did I decide to make the purchase. After all, how much is my free-time worth? The irony of feeling like I was actually losing money just doing “research” on all these “free” themes irked me, so I finally plunked down the cash. I’m happy I did.
Thesis theme has enough included bells and whistles that it seems to be that it’s worth it’s cost right “out of the box”. Once you get into customizing it, it shines even more.
Frameworks Versus Themes
If you download a theme, often times it was designed the way the author wanted to use it, so they’ve tweaked column widths for their layout, altered button sizes to match their headers, hard-coded single-row navigation bar because they have three pages on their blog. I’ve even seen navigation bars hard-coded, requiring you to name your pages exactly like the original author did in order for anything to be displayed. These all add up to more work.
The solution: use frameworks. Thesis is a framework, which basically means it’s flexible enough to allow you to use it how you want to. Most of the design is general enough that you can have the freedom to create your blog with confidence knowing that long category names, many sub-menus and such will all be handled gracefully.
Cut Your Development Time
If you’ve spent any time laying out web pages, you know that making column changes can be a headache. But Thesis allows you to switch between 1, 2 or 3 column layouts and select the widths of each at the touch of a (save) button. This is great if you decided later you want to add a new widget, or display adds in a different place. Great for A/B testing and just convenient if you want to try out a new look without investing any time.
Much of the work that isn’t handled in the main Thesis control panels can still be done through the control panel Custom File Editor. Just make a change to the custom.css and hit save. Presto, you’ve got your updated change. No uploading .css files or FTP needed. (Especially helpful if you’re ever behind a firewall.) It’s also great for prototyping designs.
Batteries Included
If you are not interested in spending a lot of time maintaining or updating the look and feel of your blog, you still get a great looking design out of the box. You can basically not add anything and you will still end up with a good system for getting ranked in the search engines due to all the built in optimizations included by default. You don’t even have to know what that means and you will still get the benefits when you write your first post.
Of course, I personally know very few people who don’t spend copious amounts of time getting everything just right. For those of us, there are many customized sidebars and a system of hooks that allow you to customize every inch of your screen.
Your Biggest Support Group
Another benefit of getting into Thesis is that it already has a huge base of existing users. Good luck finding that with most other free themes out there. Not only are your most frequently asked questions already answered most of the time, but you’ll be able to get support from the authors of the theme if you can’t find a specific answer.
Which Version To Buy?
Since I have several websites and thought it would be a good solution for my clients to use I purchased the developer license. This allows you to remove the attribution in the footer as well as use it over an unlimited number of sites. Perfect.
Perfect in the sense that it can be used as a default theme framework for new clients, and that I can get something up and running immediately that works.
If you found this article useful and helped you decide to get Thesis, I’d love it if you bought it through my affiliate link here. But if not, at least drop me a comment on your experiences.
Now, don’t even get me started about plugins. 
Note: This is not a paid review. I was not given anything free to write about Thesis, I just like it. I hope someone who found this review useful might follow the affiliate link above to purchase their own copy.