Since people began releasing WordPress themes with options screens the bar has been raised higher and higher, with more and more options available making it easier for the user to customize their site. I have worked with many of these themes, and have been impressed with the quality. In particular, the themes from iThemes and StudioPress are great to work with and I regularly recommend them as being well worth the purchase price. They are particularly nice if you don’t want to have to do a lot of customization to get a really slick, professional looking site.
Even with all the options available in the premium themes I have experience with, I have wondered when a theme would come out that allowed control of everything from the admin panel without the user having to touch a bit of code. When the Headway theme was released, I wondered no longer.
Blown Away
This theme has an option for everything. From simple things like changing your fonts and colors, to complex things like arranging page templates with an awesome drag and drop interface and adding sidebar widgets wherever you want. Want a whole page of widgets? No problem. Want to immediately integrate Twitter into your site? Easy. Want to automatically insert Adsense code after every post? Simple.
All these options mean that you don’t have to spend hours coding and solving layout problems, but instead, spend more time on the fun stuff. The theme is set up to accommodate custom CSS and skins, and though I haven’t yet been all the way through a site customization with it, I’ve played around with it enough to see that it should be no problem. With other themes, like Thesis for example, which really is a great theme, once you want to take the customization beyond a certain point it gets really complicated. With Headway, every site can look completely different with very little work on your part.
When is Headway not the right choice?
This is not the theme to buy if you want to have a highly designed web site right out of the box. Go to iThemes and StudioPress for that. Though I do expect that more and more skins will be available over time, Headway out of the box is clean and simple.
I could go on and on…
…but that would bore you. So, check out the video below for more about the theme and then click through to the Headway site here to learn more.