Community Forums › Forums › Archived Forums › Design Tips and Tricks › Trying to Justify Purchase of Genesis and Theme
- This topic has 4 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 8 months ago by Opptrends.
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July 17, 2016 at 8:42 am #189694OpptrendsMember
Hello,
Sorry I was not sure if this should be in this forum or somewhere else.
A friend of mine suggested that I look into Genesis Framework/Themes for a change as I do change the look/Theme every couple of years. The site started with the Thesis Theme 1.8.6, at the time I did not know better and stuck with it and did a lot of customization and finally got sick of it after couple of years to this day, because I have a lot of posts, some are still without a feature image thanks to Thesis.
Anyway, sick of Thesis and customization, I moved to Themeforest and chose the Magic Mag theme for $59. With this theme I do no custom work and I use no plugin for any design related stuff, just the usual Yoast SEO, Google News Plugin and W3T Cache. The theme gives me everything with just point and click in the theme settings all is built in, popular posts, related posts, tabbed or non-tabled, different layouts for the homepage and individual layouts for posts as well etc..etc..
Looking at Genesis and the News Pro theme, flashes of bad experience with Thesis start, seems there's a lot of customization to be done with Genesis/News Pro.
Those of you using Genesis and child theme, please help me justify the move.
Here's my site: http://goo.gl/J33Lkh
And here is the theme demo: http://goo.gl/vqhFsKThanks,
July 17, 2016 at 9:48 am #189696toddlohenryMemberI've been a developer of WordPress websites for over 10 years. I've tried every major theme developer there is and I only use Studiopress. I tell my clients you can pick any theme as long as it's from studio press...
Why?
Quality
Support
Availability of specialty plugins in the WordPress codex
SEOThe themes just work great...
July 17, 2016 at 11:31 am #189699OpptrendsMembertoddlohenry,
Thanks so much for the prompt reply; I agree that Genesis is quality clean coded Framework, but I don't think that's everything. For people who are not developers and myself included, it takes a lot of frustration and customization to get the Studiopress theme to the functionality we want.
Take for example the News Pro theme, in order to get the homepage layout full width, you'd have to use custom code/css etc.. while in my current theme I can change from boxed to wide layout with one click, header ad size in News Pro is an issue and I haven't seen anywhere how to ad the adsense code, either a link or image no other choice while in my current theme I can go under header ads and either paste adsense code or any code, use a link or just publisher ID or ad ID if responsive ad and I'm done.
Support is also good although it depends on which theme you purchase. As for plugins, well, I don;t have to get anything all is built-in, again depends on the theme. SEO, I use Yoast and it's working great.
Studiopress could build a lot of generally used functionality into their themes if they wanted to grab more market share, the features mentioned above should be a walk in the park for a team like Studiopress.
July 17, 2016 at 11:59 am #189700SusanModeratorFor people who are not developers and myself included, it takes a lot of frustration and customization to get the Studiopress theme to the functionality we want.
I don't have a development or design background. When I bought the Genesis Framework and my first theme (Pretty Darn Cute Design's Modern Blogger), I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't at all frustrated, because the support I received was excellent. I quickly got hooked on the Genesis Framework, and how easy it was to be able to do what I wanted (and how easy it was to customize). Since that time (less than 4 years ago), I've built a thriving business building websites using the Genesis Framework exclusively. I've released my own theme, and I provide theme support for Pretty Darn Cute Design. All because I didn't get frustrated when I first started.
July 17, 2016 at 3:06 pm #189713OpptrendsMemberSusan,
Thanks for the input; if you got to the point where you have your own theme then you're definitely not like us. If you are OK with a mile long custom functions and hooks then I understand your position.
About 4 years ago, as I mentioned, I started out with Thesis, it's not that different from Genesis by the way, and the custom functions file was way too long I lost track where things were and when I wanted to use the Yoast plugin, it turned out I couldn't because Thesis will not disable its SEO and the only way is to hack Thesis core files...that means after every upgrade you'd have to redo the process again. To me, that's frustrating. Left Thesis to no return!
Why do I have to seek support and Google "how to" when the theme should have all common features readily available with a click? I can understand in a situation where the feature requested requires customization (*not common), but all these popular posts and related posts by category with thumbs etc are very common now and should be built-in.
From what I can see, a lot of things require customization or a plugin in Genesis just like Thesis. At least Genesis is now responsive I doubt Thesis made the leap yet 🙂
I would like to thank you and toddlohenry for taking the time to reply, really appreciated, your replies are very useful and now I have an idea, who knows I may accept the customization part if I see that I need to use Genesis/News Pro as I will keep the research going I have time to choose.
Best wishes!
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