We're going to be setting up a new SEO and marketing blog soon, but it's been a while since I've been in the market for a WordPress theme. Honestly, I've spent the past 2 hours searching for something halfway decent and I can't find anything that's not meant to be a corporate homepage or looks like some abstract art project bullshit.
What do you guys recommend? Price isn't an issue. I'm just looking for a theme that is clean and friendly looking, light weight, and obviously plays well with Google. Something like Neil Patel uses on QuickSprout.
I was very interested in using Convergence like Matthew Woodward uses, but it looks like it is no longer supported by the developer...
Thanks for your input!
- Matt
I can't wait to make you buy a theme via my expensive affiliate links!
But for real the best theme is Thesis 2.1 IMO. The framework is fast, it's easy to use, and if you search for "thesis skins" you will always find something that looks really, really nice. The sites I have running on Thesis are REALLY good and I'm pretty much OCD with WP themes. I can't even feel enthusiastic to work on a site if it looks bad, every time I set up a site I usually browse the entire free theme repository on WP rejecting 1000s of them until something feels right. My Thesis sites absolutely blow my others out of the water in terms of design, the skins I've bought are beautiful.
Thesis's custom CSS editing box is really good. It's colored like Notepad++ and other code editing software and it automatically adds indents for you so the file looks neat and tidy. Boxes are easy to work with you can drag elements to completely new locations.
Genesis in contrast, I find it looks too big, it doesn't suit many projects for me because of that. Even the child themes are "big", everything feels zoomed in. X Theme is apparently rubbish according to SkyrocketSEO and I think he's the best member on here right now, very high level in terms of skill and also reputable.
There are two downsides to Thesis you should be aware of. Firstly the whole "functions" thing they've got going on I hate. You get those complex "Add_Action" code files. I can't code with them at all I don't even know what language it is, PHP perhaps? There are tutorials for doing most basic things you can find online though personally I haven't had to touch those since Thesis 1.8.5 before boxes existed. Second thing is the price. It's much more expensive than Genesis (you NEEEED the professional licence, heed my warning) which is $195 and then you still have to pay for the third party skins. But they are QUALITY and the framework, as I said, is pretty easy to use, performs well and feels like it's coded well. Buying random themes off of TemplateMonster I always kind of feel like I'm getting slow shoddy code, and you never quite know what to do with the backend. Running Thesis every site has the same backend which makes life easier.
