One of the reasons I promote premium WordPress themes is that they help me do things much easier than it used to be in the old days of blogging. For instance, I dropped Brian Gardner from the Genesis theme (affiliate link) framework a line and asked if he could help me add back in my “subscribe via email” box that used to be in the upper right corner of my design. It took him all of 30 seconds to do this for me.
So, that got me looking around.
I realized just how much I could do without asking for help. For instance, if I switched [chrisbrogan.com] over to be a multi-author blog, I could toss in an “author box” to tell you who wrote which piece without much fuss. (All these kinds of options exist in different ways on all kinds of other premium WordPress themes, by the way. I’m just talking about this one because it’s what runs my site right now).
I also found that I could do more with SEO, if I wanted to improve my search engine efforts on the site. This actually led me to find a few things I wanted to change, and will now research so that I don’t break anything.
Finally, in the widgets area, I found that there were a lot of drag and drop opportunities to add functionality (and remove it) at will. This is partly because WordPress 3 is much easier to use than ever before, but also because some of what Genesis threw in there appealed to things I might need at any given moment.
For instance, the question I asked Brian Gardner? It was already answered for me here on the widgets page:
Premium Themes Rule
I’m getting ready to launch some projects on some other themes, but the lessons I learned the other day while trying out Genesis a bit more were really useful.
There are plenty out there, and you have your favorites, I’m sure. I’m not voting for favorites any more. I just like that well-developed themes really count for something. There are some real winners out there that help me do my job much better. If you haven’t made the switch to something a little more custom, give it some thought.