I am also a non-coder and hence give you some advice. I have taught myself to use WordPress. I taught myself to use and edit themes by Studiopress and IThemes. But it takes time….a lot of it….and I am still not an expert. It was enough to get me started online though.

And being a non-coder it can be incredibly frustrating some days. Support forums are great and very helpful, but sometimes the people who help are speaking a foreign language – code!

We use Thesis for all of our sites now, but I also have someone else who does the coding. I think if you’re going to go down the path of a premium theme and you want to make some decent changes to it, then:
1) you need to be prepared to spend hundreds of hours learning code, wordpress etc Possibly even thousands of hours to get good at it.
2) Spend some money and get a professional to edit it for you. You could probably go on eLance and get it for as little as a couple of hundred bucks.

If I was you I’d definitely go with option 2. (But keep educating yourself in code and WP and its functionality – but you can probably do something more prouctive with your time that spend thousands of hours learning code if it’s not really your passion).

Good luck!

Luke

I have concerns though. I have ZERO coding experience and know next to nothing about wordpress in general. What I want to to is change colors, font and add social media buttons and such.

So for a person like me with know coding knowledge what is my best option? I want to make customizations but it seems that thesis might be too difficult? Help me out please.

It look great for what it does, but I want to capture the contact via cformsII or some other email post submitter. Then again, I couldn’t find specific references to the same thing for Thesis either; just a handful of indirect references that somewhat indicate it’s possible.

I mean, how can any of these “premium” templates not have forms creation; processing; autoresponders and email lead submission built in… with tutorials? Without it, they are only premium in price.

Andrew

Initially, I thought I’d go for Affilliate. Then reading some of the Thesis reviews on the Thesis site and seeing what it could do – I decided that thesis seems so much more flexible.

But the above comments have really done it for me. Whilst I definitely think that Thesis seems more flexible, comprehensive, and has a lot more features.

I’m not a real techie person and I want speed and ease. And so it is definitely Affiliate.

Thanks Guys for all of your comments.

Kashonia
http://www.TheLearningLovingandLaughingProject.com

What I’ve found great is that all changes go into the custom files, and I’ve already made some changes. I just copy the normal CSS code for what I want to change to the custom file and then play with it there. I’ve already done some customisation to make it look a little less standard but want to try and replace the top menu system next with some that has some better formatting and nice dropdowns, but I love the fact that when I upgrade the template files I won’t have to worry about re-integrating all my hacking around with the CSS.

Regards, Mark.

I’ve been blogging for about three years. I’ve built website and blogs. I’m not newbie when it comes to the behind the scenes mechanics of WordPress.

That said, I’ve been more frustrated than pleased with the Thesis Theme. IMHO, and somewhat contrary to the marketing behind it, it’s not built with ‘ease of set-up’ as it’s main attraction. If you’re a coder, you’re probably fine with Thesis. But it you’re a casual WP mechanic, it can be challenging. Even the Thesis forum, while well-intentioned, is somewhat vague in its assistance efforts.

Here’s a very helpful resource for those who wish to tough it out on the Thesis front. Marko Saric’s blog: ‘HowToMakeMyBlog.’ http://howtomakemyblog.com is the link.

He’s got some great tutorials with visuals that make it pretty easy to get the same results he’s getting in terms of design.

If I weren’t as far along the road using a different theme for BlogAsReligion as I am, I’d do a regroup. However, for the rest of you it’s really worth the time to read Marko’s slant on Thesis.

It just might make it easier…and isn’t that what we all want?

Affiliate theme in my opinion is a no match for Thesis in SEO. Just speaking because I saw the framework of both.

Thanks for sharing!

Its not intuitive at all, and there are a ton of free wordpress themes that have a better look and feel.

I’d save yourself the $87.

Whilst I’m really pleased with the look and feel of my site, I had to get a lot of the work done by someone else as the code needed work and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do through the dashboard to make the changes I wanted and to improve the SEO. I’m stoked with the end result but given I’m code challenged, I had to pay for it.