It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re searching for a WordPress theme to use for your new website design. There are tens of thousands available. Some are free, some you have to pay for and in most cases… you get what you pay for. Most themes are not intuitive for your average business owner to just “throw a website together”, free or paid, and can end in frustration for the end user. Which then leads to a call to a company such as ours to fix and/or finish the website.
So, how do you end the frustration? How can you make it easier on yourself?
The simple answer is to do it right the first time. The problem with the simple answer is, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” If you can minimize what you “need” to know, the process of building a website can be made simpler.
3rd party themes, such as the kind you purchase from Themeforest, can be the most difficult. Don’t take that the wrong way, I’ve used my fair share of them (and even have some favorites like The Bridge Theme), but over-all, they’re not consistent in structure or code and you’ll find yourself spending hours trying to figure out how to put the theme together. Sometimes the simple task of adding a sidebar can be a nightmare, even for a developer. What you “need” to know to use a 3rd party theme can be drastically different for most 3rd party themes thus raising the level of the amount of time and frustration it will take to build your website. For the business owner, this equates to more money paid to a developer to “fix” the website and the end product is usually not what you wanted in the first place.
With the Genesis Framework you start with a basic frame of your website. It is, in it’s simplest form, a header, menu, content, sidebar and footer. Then you add a child theme, which is a theme that builds on the parent theme, which in this case is Genesis. The child themes then are, for the most part, put together the same way using the same “hooks”. For instance, most Genesis child themes use widgets to “hook” content into the header, sidebar, footer, etc. It’s very simple and efficient.
Genesis developers have also developed some great plugins to make the process even simpler. Plugins such as “Genesis Simple Edits” which allows you to add content to the footer and copyright bar very easily and “Genesis Simple Sidebars” which allows you to have a different sidebar on every page if you want. Nathan Rice developed both of those plugins but there are dozens more by other developers that make Genesis very simple.
And, speaking of Genesis Developers, there is a large community of developers who are very willing to help each other out with any issues that might come up. They are a fantastic group of people whose main focus is to make great websites.
So why do WE us Genesis to build most of our websites? It’s simple. It’s fast. It’s reliable. The child themes and plugins make putting together a website very easy. If we have the content from the client we can build a site in sometimes just a few hours! It’s a lightweight framework, which means your page-speed is also very fast. With such a huge community of developers, you know it’s reliable and constantly updated.
If you have any questions about the Genesis framework, feel free to leave it in the comments below.
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