Pondering what the best theme for WordPress is? Before settling on Headway I tried FlexSqueeze, Affiliate Theme, K2, WP Remix, building my own using Artisteer and dozens of others, some free, some not so free. In the end Headway won hands-down no-contest. There is simply no other theme that affords this level of flexibility – not even making your own with Artisteer.
Watch over my shoulder as I build this blog using Headway in 78 minutes. I know, 78 minutes is not exactly the instant-gratification some people might lead you to believe, but its reality – this is reality, warts and all.
What you’ll see on the video:
- Starting from scratch with a live site using Headway 1.5
- Creating a magazine-like layout for the blog
- Look-and-feel: Modifying fonts, colors, spacing and visual elements
- Customizing layout and sidebars for special pages like “About”
- Linking and customizing archives, categories and other pages
- Re-using sidebars selectively – footers and others
- Working with tons of sidebars and even more widgets
- Integrating bbPress as a WordPress widget (yes, a widget)
- Tweaking the SEO parameters and using the code hooks
You can skip around the video getting a feel for how the theme works or grab some popcorn.
The video has no voiceover, so select your favorite soundtrack or listen to the voices in your head.
This is me building the site and it is largely unscripted – so you’ll see me fight with the layout a bit, get the type of leaf mixed up, fiddle with colors and other errors you’ll do yourself. You want to see the pitfalls and problems – for the finished result just take a screenshot of my site.
- FlexSqueeze: Excellent theme, but for affiliates or made-for-adsense sites.
- Affiliate Theme: Very nice. But again good only for affiliate marketing or made-for-adsense sites.
- K2: Super-slick dynamic resizing and display of elements. Limited to three columns.
- WP Remix: Eye-catching, but better suited to a more static site.
- Artisteer: This was my second pick for a theme. It creates beautiful themes and gives you an incredible level of customization – but has only a few layout options. In an ideal world, Artisteer would let me build Headway skins with Artisteer – that would rock! As it stands, Artisteer is better than 80% of the themes I tested, but definitely not better than targeted themes (for example for video sites or affiliates) and not as flexible as Headway.
- Headway: Need I say more? My biggest problem with Headway today is that the visual editor gets stuck on loading with some plug-ins enabled. This can be worked around (and you can see me do it) by turning plug-ins on and off when going into edit mode – understandable for bleeding-edge tech and a small price to pay for WYSIWYG in-place layout editing of your blog! Update 12/22/09: With Version 1.5.5 all the Visual Editor glitches I encountered have been resolved – the Visual Editor was overhauled as is now even better. Stop staring and start building!
