When you visit Thesis Styles.com you land on a home page that serves the triple purpose of a home page, squeeze page for subscribing and downloading free files (2 great Thesis Skins) and a gallery of Thesis Theme skins to pimp your default Thesis Theme. Brilliant!
Like the Thesis Theme skins on offer, Thesis Styles is polished, clean and classy looking. On my last visit I discovered 14 different Thesis skins you can download, two of which are free by simply subscribing.
If you are not interested in purchasing a Thesis skin straight up, try one for free. The instructions are easy to follow and with Thesis 1.7+ making the tweaks to your Site and Design Options is as simple as uploading a couple of files.
Want your own unique header? Thesis Styles offers some very clear and simple instructions to follow on its Thesis Styles support pages.
Thesis Styles Custom Styling
Thesis Styles uses a full width framework with a unique header, repeating logo background and a nav menu that is floated to the right.
- The site uses background images for its body (that shows on the left and right hand side of the screen) and a background for its content box (that sits in the middle). Smaller representations of these are below. The body background image used is 4 px x 433 px. The content box background used is 960px x 360 px.
- The home page is a three column layout of 31 ems each.
- The footer background is a simple colour choice e.g. #0B2D45.
Check out the custom.css (design code) for yourself using the Firebug addon with Firefox.
Unique Thesis Skins
All of the Thesis Styles Skins have different looks and layouts.
Some have two columns, others three. Footers are different, sidebars have different aspects, the feature box is used to great advantage with some skins and more subtlely with others. At the end of the day it really depends on what grabs you when you gaze at each of them in turn.
I recommend you start with the first blog post and work through the ‘previous posts’, clicking on ‘DEMO’ and looking at each in turn. Some of the sidebars, feature box areas and footers are truly gorgeous.
My Thoughts on Thesis Styles.com
Thesis Styles is a living example of what you can do with Thesis Theme. The site and its skins may look very different to the default, however the code to make the site unique is often as simple as a unique background, header, layout and font choices.
I actually downloaded the free Thesis Affiliate Style Light a few months ago for inspiration for a new site: read about it.
There is nothing stopping you from using a free or purchased theme from Thesis Styles and making it unique by simply adding a different background and/or header. The hard bit is often deciding how you want your site to look. Thesis Theme gives you the freedom to do whatever you want but narrowing it down to exactly what takes some thought. Thesis Styles gives some great alternatives.
If you want more choice, I always recommend you check out the Thesis Gallery site. Of course, if you do decide to purchase Thesis Theme after reading this or other articles here at Thesis Theme HQ – I would very much appreciate your purchase being made here…every little bit counts.
Back to Thesis Styles…
At the end of the day it is a sales site using Thesis Theme. It would be better (in my humble opinion) with some tweaks such as:
- Use a theme switcher like WooThemes or show full screenshots to catch those visitors that don’t know how to navigate pages or couldn’t be bothered if it requires more clicks.
- Regarding Woo Themes and other competitors that offer skins…
- I understand the Thesis Theme itself is an investment and Thesis skins whether free or for purchase (i.e. ‘premium’ skins) are an additional expense to users of the Thesis Theme; however…to be competitive I would suggest a special bonus…
- Perhaps offer 3 skins for the price of 1 if visitors purchase Thesis Theme at Thesis Styles or via a link on a site such as Thesis Theme HQ.
- There aren’t any images as such. No human element. Faces sell and make real people more comfortable.
- I believe by using an image of either the designer of the site or other friendly images (may I recommend some free images from ‘D Sharon Pruitt‘ @ Flickr) – people will feel more relaxed at an otherwise (possibly) sterile site of skins for a WordPress theme.
D Sharon Pruitt @ Flickr
- Have a link back to the main home page of Thesis Styles within every demo page/site perhaps as a page link in the nav menu.
- Add an ‘About‘ page so we can get to know the man behind the scenes and connect with him to desire to share our wealth to ‘skin’ our default Thesis Theme.
- Bill…feel free to send me a link in the comments or via the contact form so I can add an image to this page.
Thesis Theme HQ Competition
Bill @ Thesis Styles suggested we introduce a post that discusses the future of Thesis Theme aka Thesis 2.0 as often spruked by our much esteemed designer Chris Pearson. This will be the topic of a future post.
How do you think Thesis 2.0 will look and behave? Will Thesis keep ahead of the pack of WP themes trying to catch up to Thesis? What’s your crystal ball say about the future of Thesis?
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Thesis Styles.com is really offering a lot! Will be visiting the site. Thanks for sharing.
Great new header.
I’ll be switching to Thesis sometime this year. I bought a theme a few months ago but I’m wishing I would have just forked over the extra cash for Thesis and a theme for it. It is so fast and does so much.
Im going to be checking this out directly, thanks for the info.
Thesis themes are really cool for SEO and very fast loading. i have used on few of my clients blog and i found it to be very easy to customize with many options.
vector graphics´s last blog ..30 Sales Tags Vector Graphics
The theme looks pretty cool. Multimedia and web designers will certainly find your blog very useful.
http://www.broadcastingdegreeonline.net/
I have several blog on the use of my clients, I found it very easy to customize many options.
Keith Farren´s last blog ..What kind of role is trader acted the channels of times of Unified Communications?
I have seen this website. I like the all themes. It’s looks cool. I will try it for my client’s website.
Thanks for the review. We received a lot of feed back on our Thesis skins during the last few months and we’ve moved in a different direction. We’ve implemented your suggestions along with others who reviewed what we were doing.
Basically we scratched the Thesis Styles site and started a new site under an old domain I had. There’s to much going on at our site to mention the details in this comment, so we’d like to invite you and your readers to take a look at SiteSmarty.com and the new skins we’ve designed.
Thanks again for mentioning us on your blog.
I like your site http://sitesmarty.com. The layout is very clean and your marketing strategy promoting your affiliate products by providing quality products is commended. People often get more use out of a nice skin than they do from an eBook with information they may already know.
Do you intend ‘turning off’ or redirecting the original home of your skins?
We like the affiliate offer also, we’re going to build on that and offer more options as far as affiliates choices go. Yes to turning off the styles site.
I have heard so many great things about the thesis theme, it is talked about as one of the best wp themes out there, to double up as other styles is fantastic, with this theme does it have inbuilt SEO capabilities or do I have to use seoall in one? i’m thinking of switching from my current theme on Billund Car Hire to thesis but just getting the funds together!
You don’t need SEO plugins. Everything is built in.
Those are definitly some cool styles, I like briefcase brown the best. I’m thinking about implementing it into my site. Thanks for the post :-)
I for one do not think that this thesis will work because there are too much of a distraction.And we all know that if there are too many distraction on a Squeeze page it does not converts good.So I think the conversion rate will suffer.
Their site is being revamped as we speak. I will update the post when they have finished…probably a new link to http://sitesmarty.com
let me tried it out in my blog for the same.
thanks for the information