Thesis: Focus
Details are sketchy, at best, and too many people confuse social media with a live web page. While similar in appearance to some, there is a difference.
I’m thinking, it was about 2008? I switched out from hand-rolled, minimalist but arcane programming to run the main site — astrofish.net — 2007, 2009, some time in there, I moved it all over to WordPress. I was already experienced with the backend from doing blogs and such with that motor, so it fit well. I also moved from one hosting account to another, so that worked, as the data was portable.
For my main site, the missing component, the tiny piece that mattered most was a configurable “theme” that allowed me to control exactly what was displayed. I didn’t want a “powered by WordPress” button, and I didn’t want it to look like a bog-standard WordPress site. To be sure, there are certain elements in that standard install that work quite well.
Go with what works.
I stumbled onto a theme called Thesis, it was simple, there was a one-time price of maybe $200 for an unlimited-unlimited license, the theme packed in a few backend extras plus it was super lean, and best of all, with a few clicks, I could get just what I wanted on the screen.
I was still toying with it, not quite rolling it out fully, and the test site started to make money. It just flat worked, and it worked well. That WordPress Theme started earning income before I was finished with the draft version of the site itself.
Over the years, I’ve deployed that theme, in its various incarnation, across multiple sites and server-platforms. Always works.
There’s also a special nod towards the developer himself, he seems a bit over-the-top providing excellent customer support. He’s personally stomped on a software bug that only showed up in my one weird installation.
When I switched to the newer version of the themes, Thesis: Focus, I ran into some design issues. The company, the theme’s home on the web, it has a long list of “help” and “read me” type of entries that address concerns, and help keep track of what is happening, even now.
Thesis: Focus
Web trends shift, change, and now, more so than ever, a site has to be fluid, in my mind, or dynamic, or whatever the current phrase is. From a big screen monitor, like a TV set? To the smallest flip-phone. Yeah, I let the theme take care of that. Let the machines do the heavy lifting?
Couple of features that tickle my sensibilities? “Golden Ratio Typography,” the theme adjusts lines and font sizes, and while the font selection is almost limitless, it’s easy to follow the guidelines. The theme makes it super-easy to pick type and display faces that work, and hopefully, show a bit of personality — if that is a goal.
I’m text heavy, relying on words and prose instead of images. Suits me fine, and as such, this is a perfect kind of theme. But in its day, I did run a couple of image-only sites, Bexar County Line as the example, with the theme.
“Web pages” are simply stylized data. With the WordPress Blog Motor, it’s easy to adjust that style and form to fit anything.
Did I mention obsessive attention to detail? There is that. Despite it’s over-arching abilities, the main purpose of the theme is to keep the information delivered as quickly as possible. It’s lightweight, in software terms, but equally strong, in software terms.
Thesis: Focus
Thesis: Focus — highly recommended.
Sidebar note, and unexamined data: poking around in the backend, looking at settings and trying to fix something that wasn’t broken? I happened across a bit of data — the software “magically” back itself up before an update. Just the nicest of little touches. I still miss the old message, though, “The update was a ravishing success.”
astrofish.net/shop
