Headway Theme vs. Thesis Theme

Before I started this site, all my sites were based on Thesis Theme. I felt comfortable using it and I really hadn’t thought about trying any other premium WordPress theme. When Headway 2.0 came out, I saw some of the Headway videos of how it worked, and I was so impressed that I decided to test it out. This is how this site was born.

Now that I’ve played with Headway Themes a little bit now, the question I get asked the most is…“How does Headway Themes 2.0 compare to Thesis?”. This is not surprising since Thesis Theme is probably the most popular premium wordpress theme out there at the moment. Since I have quite a bit of experience with both now, I thought I should write a post comparing the two.

Thesis Theme Pros

• SEO Ready out of the box – No additional SEO plugins needed.
• Dynamically switch between 1, 2, 3 column layouts and adjust the width for each.
• Easy to use Site and Design Options to customize your site how you like it.
• One-click upload of your own custom image header.
• Works with WordPress 3.0 navigation menu system.
• Easily backup your options so you can use common ones on all your other sites.
• Huge Thesis community – Tons of third-party sites sharing their tips and tricks on how to customize Thesis to do some really cool things.
• Thesis hooks – Makes it easy for programmers to customize their Thesis site even further.

Thesis Theme Cons

• Without a lot of customization, your site will look like every other Thesis site.
• No widgetized footer.
• Thesis hooks. For non programmers, understanding how they work can be quite daunting.

As someone who is a programmer, the fact that I have to write my own custom functions via Thesis Hooks to specific things I want doesn’t really bother me. However, for some people this may be a problem and I have heard from other people that Thesis can be hard to use. The large community is a huge plus though, and it’s really easy to get your Thesis questions answered.

Headway Theme Pros

• Killer Visual Editor – Allows you to customize your site in real-time.
• Powerful SEO Options – No need to download any SEO plugins either. (Love the Search Engine Preview display!)
• One-click GZIP Compression – Just a simple checkbox makes your site load way faster.
• Upload your own header images and Headway will even suggest a blog color scheme based on it.
• Unlimited Sidebars and Leafs.
• Create custom leafs to do pretty much anything you want.
• Automatic, one-click upgrades.
• Add widgetized footers.

Headway Theme Cons

• Harder to learn than Thesis. It took me some time to wrap my head around different Headway specific concepts like Leafs and page layouts and figuring out how to use the Visual Editor more efficiently.
• Needs some better out of the box Leafs. I find the current selection of Leafs that come with Headway a little underwhelming, and it would be nice to see a better demonstration of what Leafs can do.
• Needs better documentation. It’s actually not bad, but they could do a better job explaining the basic Headway Theme concepts and shortening the learning curve.

The best thing about Headway Themes hands-down, is the visual editor. It took me some time to figure out how to use it, but one I did, I was blown away by how easy it allows you to customize your site. With a Thesis Theme site, making changes to the fonts and colors requires you to go to the Design Options panel, find the specific element you want to edit, change the value, click save, and then load your site to see what changed.

With the Headway Theme Visual Editor, you can directly click on elements of your site (header, post titles, menu items) and change the colors and fonts of each element, and see how it looks in real-time! It’s really a much more efficient way to customize your designs, and this is the one thing that Thesis Theme can’t match.

Thesis Theme or Headway Theme – Which Should You Pick?

If you are a beginning WordPress user, I think you might find Thesis Theme more accessible to use at first. Everything can be customized from one or two screens and it’s pretty easy to get started with. The learning curve is a bit easier and you can do some interesting things out of the box.

However, once you learn how Headway Theme works, you’ll definitely fall in love with the visual editor. Being able to change the various elements of your site in real-time is such an awesome feature to have. It just makes creating nice looking designs so much easier. Plus, once you dig deeper into Headway, you’ll start to realize how powerful the leaf and layout systems really are to allow you to create some really flexible and cool designs.

I honestly can’t really complain too much about either of these two themes, and I’ll continue to use them both. They both have 30 day money back guarantees, so I would definitely give each of them a try and see for yourself. Please leave a comment below, and let me know what you think.

Visit Theme Theme (official site)
Visit Headway Theme (official site)

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