Thesis Review - A Premium Blog Theme For WordPress
A couple of weeks ago I introduced and reviewed the Affiliate Theme, which I called the perfect WordPress blog theme for marketing.
In the comments to that review, some people mentioned they were using the Thesis Theme, which is also a very powerful theme for WordPress created by Chris Pearson and Brian Clark, two very respected bloggers.
Custom themes for WordPress like Thesis and Affiliate Theme make it MUCH easier to maintain a professional blog, especially if you don’t know how to manipulate code like HTML and CSS. You can use these themes to easily change the design and look of your blog, they are very well optimized for search engines and give you a lot more power of your blog than the default WordPress set-up.
Which Theme is Better? Thesis or Affiliate Theme?
In response to feedback on my Affiliate Theme review, it was clear people wanted to compare it to the Thesis theme.
Joel Williams (BlogTechGuy.com), who is the technology mentor in my private forum for paying students, is a regular user of Thesis, so I invited him to write a review of it and then do a cross comparison between Thesis and Affiliate Theme.
If you’re looking for a robust and powerful theme for your WordPress blog, have a read of what Joel has to say below, read my review of the Affiliate Theme and then decide which one to go with.
Thesis Blog Theme Review
A lot of blog owners are looking for a middle ground between a free, but generic blog theme and a unique, but expensive custom theme. This gap has been filled with the “premium” theme, a paid for theme that is not unique, but comes with admin options and customer support. There are a wide variety of premium themes out there, but Thesis is perhaps one of the most well-known and used.
What is Thesis?
Simply, it’s a Wordpress theme, but it is much more than that. It is often described as a “theme framework” due to the fact that many different styles and types of theme can be created from Thesis.
Created by Chris Pearson, and expertly supported by Rick Beckman, the theme has been through a major series of regular updates, continually adding new and user requested features from the 3,000+ users.
It allows the user a huge amount of control through two control panel menus. One is based on configuration options that I won’t go into detail but include options such as what pages to include in navigation, what information you want to show about each post, some display options, Feedburner feed URL and any header or footer scripts that you wish to include.
The other menu, Thesis Design Options (pictured) really give the theme massive flexibility. In the current version (1.5) some of the options include:
The Perfect WordPress Theme For Marketing
I’ve been in communication with Nate Whitehill from Unique Blog Designs for many months now and today his team have released something that all affiliate marketers should be excited about.
Back in August of 08 Nate and his team decided to begin work on a special WordPress theme that would make life easier for affiliate marketers to create websites.
Many online marketers today use WordPress blogs as their default website content management system to set up landing pages, mini-sites and review sites - stock staples for affiliate marketers. This new premium theme makes the process of creating affiliate marketing sites a select-and-click process, much easier and more efficient than hacking standard WordPress themes or building sites from scratch using Frontpage or Dreamweaver for example.
The theme has been given the very obvious name - Affiliate Theme - and you can read more about it here -
What Is Affiliate Theme?
Affiliate Theme is a premium WordPress theme with a customized back-end administration system that allows you to easily control and test the elements of your website.
I’ve had access to the theme for a few days now and had a play with the interface. If you’ve ever wanted to control the most crucial elements of your WordPress blog without needing to go in and hack the code, this is the theme you need, especially if you set up blog websites to sell affiliate offers.
Here’s a list of some of the customization options -
- With a single click you can change the entire layout from 1-column, 2-column, 3-column, 4-column, left-column sidebar or right-column sidebar. That effectively means you can test six different website layouts without needing multiple themes.
- You can control the background colors or images, font typography, homepage title and header graphics.
- You can easily insert tracking code without needing to hack your theme.
- Your blog’s navigation system can easily be changed, as well as the footer elements.
- There are settings for a featured offer on your homepage (like a highlight box) and also individual page offers.
- and a WHOLE lot more…
Frankly it’s hard to explain this using text, so the best introduction you can have is this video that Nate put together to introduce you to the Affiliate Theme -
How To Profit With Affiliate Theme
Affiliate Theme is designed for affiliate marketers, in particular marketers who use affiliate networks to find offers in many different niches they then promote with websites.
Three Books And A Beanbag That Doesn’t Smell Funny
In the interview I did with Robb Sutton he talked about the $10,000+ worth of freebies he’s received thanks to blogging.
While I haven’t been that active pursuing free product thanks to the exposure this blog grants me, I do get things in the mail from time to time. In the spirit of saying thanks for the freebies, here are short reviews of three books I received that you may find interesting and a not quite as expected gift of a beanbag that I’ve been putting to good use.
The Sumolounge Omni Chair
When Andrew Milligan emailed me and told me that his company Sumolounge were entering Australia and whether I would, as a high profile Australian blogger, like to try out one of his beanbags, I was initially torn about what to do.
I wanted the beanbag. My house, still being quite new, is sparse for furniture and having recently won a 40in Sony Bravia LCD TV in an affiliate competition I needed (err, desired) something to sit on to watch it. I was also very curious to know what made the sumolounge beanbags different from your everyday run-of-the-mill beanbag, which I had grown up with and known as grungy and smelly bags, often spewing forth little white foam balls.
The problem, as I saw it, was how to justify taking a free beanbag given I would have to find a way to tie it into the topic of my blog so I could repay the favor of the freebie with some exposure for Andrew and his company.
New Free Report: The Roadmap To Become A Blogger
Update: The MP3 audio version of the Roadmap report has been added to the download page and it’s free too. Now you can read and listen to what it takes to build a great blog!
I’m very excited to announce that my latest report, co-authored with Gideon Shalwick, my partner in the Becomeablogger.com video site, is now ready for download.
Gideon and I have been working hard for the past few months preparing this report for you. It’s called “The Roadmap To Become A Blogger“, or as I like to simply call it - “The Roadmap“.
You can download the free report right now from here -
Why Another Report About Blogging?
I don’t release new products very often. The reason why is because I prefer to invest time in something to make sure it delivers tremendous value and I like to have the opportunity to develop a product with feedback from active participants.
Back in 2007 I hired Gideon Shalwick to produce a series of videos I had envisioned for a domain name that I acquired called becomeablogger.com. I wanted to have some very basic training presented in video for people new to blogs so they could learn how to begin the blogging process by themselves, no matter what skill they currently possessed with technology.
Fast forward to today and we are nearing 60,000 viewers of those videos. Gideon did a fantastic job and I’m so pleased the site has truly taken off.
Gideon and I both agreed that if the videos were well received we would like to do more. However, in order to devote the time and resources into creating the videos (the free videos we currently give away cost several thousand dollars to create), we would need to make the service a membership site, and hence the idea for Become A Blogger Premium was born.
This new premium video membership site will open December 4th 2008 to invite the first intake of students. I’ll have more news about that soon.
As soon as we decided to launch the new training program I knew we would need something to give away as a teaching tool to introduce people to the concepts we are presenting in the new series of videos. After going back and forwards between delivering the resource in video or text, we decided to use both, but focus our core message in one document - The Roadmap.
What Is The Roadmap Report?
Blogging To The Bank 3.0 Review - Is It Worth Buying?
A Million Dollars From Blogging Or Just Another E-Book With Big Claims?
This is the third installment of Rob Benwell’s Blogging To The Bank book, which teaches his method for making money with blogs.
More details about the book are here -
What’s compelling about Rob’s story is that he’s made over a million dollars using blogs and there’s very, very few people who can claim this. His book has massive appeal just because we all want to find out exactly what he does different - what’s his secret?
I reviewed Rob’s second version this book back in August of 2007, where one thing was quite clear - Rob uses blogs in a much different way to make money online to how I use blogs. You can read my original review by clicking here - Blogging To The Bank 2.0 Review.
Niche Marketing
The strategy Rob applies is about leveraging multiple blogs in multiple niches to make a lot of money. This is not about becoming a dominant player - an expert - in one niche subject area that you are passionate about, which is more the “Blog Mastermind school of blogging”.
Although the overall strategy might be quite different between what I teach and do and what Rob does, if you break things down, the fundamentals remain the same.
Rob’s system for profitable blogging still relies on the same principles to make it work, which are -
