Headway Theme Development
As I indicated a while back, I had to upgrade my blog theme because I updated WordPress and my theme broke. I looked at it carefully because the old theme could be updated (I was using a Revolution theme) but I decided not to go that route.
Why? I liked the magazine look of Revolution and I’m a big fan of it but – and it’s a big but – it’s a heck of a lot of messin’ around to customize. And it’s an ongoing pain in the anatomy to post stuff. It works well enough – but if I have something quick I want to share, I have to go through uploading the right size image etc etc and it takes more time than the small post is worth. Consequently, I found myself putting off uploading interesting tidbits that I think you’d enjoy seeing or reading. My look was right out of the box and while this wasn’t a real problem for me (or for you considering the growth in this blog readership) it wasn’t unique by any means.
Deciding not to use Revolution, meant I had to find and install a new theme. I like the abilities of the Thesis theme but when I saw the drag and drop capacity of Headway, I said that’s the kind of theme for a dummy programmer such as myself. 
That’s not to say there’s not a learning curve involved. Far from it. This puppy has a lot of capacity under the hood. Far more than I’ll ever use for sure but I can get a decent look and feel and make it quick to post. If you’re a designer type, you’ll want to play around with the back end and as far as I can tell, there’s no limit to what a great designer can do with this theme.
The potential downside is that I’m not a designer. So my overall objective is to keep it simple and neat. Lots of white space. Lots of pictures (hey, it’s a gardening blog) and easy to read. But I can see (and have seen in some examples used by other bloggers) where they simply went nuts with gizmos and geegaws just because they could do their own design. Just because you *can* design something doesn’t mean you should design it. (Hmmm, there may be a lesson there for gardening too)
I like it because it’s flexible enough to change. When I get tired of this look – I don’t have to mess about with code. I just drag, drop, change a few buttons behind the scenes and I get to look at something new. Mind you, that means you have to look at something new too…
The learning curve isn’t bad but there is a bit of a curve here. It took a few hours of looking at some of the examples to see what was possible and then figuring out from the videos how to go about doing it.
And there’s the images. You see the rotating images on the top of the main page. These are 250×250 pixels – so I had to cut the right size pics to fit into the boxes – and then link them to the posts. This will be ongoing. When I come up with an interesting post, I’ll have to cut a new picture of that size to fit the box and do a bit of simple coding. But I had to do that with *every* post on the Revolution theme so this is a walk in the park. Now, only the featured posts will wind up with images. It’s a bit of work up front to get the images going but it should be relatively easy to maintain going forward.
Bottom line: A bit of work to retool the top images and everything else fits into place. It’s bare bones for the moment but I kind of like it that way. Easy to read and I can get some images up here and some interesting quick stuff along with the longer posts.
So – stay tuned. You’ll likely see me messing about with the fine points over the next little while (I’m thinking about the title spaces) but the content area is pretty much done.
And Headway works (disclosure: affiliate link, all proceeds donated to Doctors Without Borders) – it’s your blog design, your way. Not raw beginner safe but once you’re over the first WordPress hump, you’re likely good to go.
Hey Doug, great job with your Headway blog so far. Enjoyed your post about Headway and thanks. If you have any questions, make sure to visit your forums on Headway. Or drop me an email grant at g2webmedia dot com Looking forward to watching what you do with your blog next.
Hey there Doug,
I’m like you, not a coder or developer so Headway made a big difference. I’m messing with some designs on a dummy sub-domain so I’ll be sure to have them in the Headways forum when live to give you some ideas of non- CSS stuff
Cheers, and hope you keep enjoying Headway,
Danny.
“Just because you *can* design something doesn’t mean you should design it.”
PERFECT! I’m Tweetin’ that, with attribution!
Thanks so much for sharing about your experience with Headway. I was tempted initially but read that Thesis was coming out with Drag N Drop in September I decided to wait since I already own and use Thesis. I like Thesis’s SEO functionality a lot.
Headway seems like a quality theme though and I’m glad for Thesis to have some real competition. Sometimes I wonder if they get a bit complacent in their top dog status and don’t bother too much with making instructions really usable. I feel like I need to ask for help in the support forums to do really simple things that should probably have a tutorial or instruction guide by now.
Anyway, fun to see what you’re doing with it. Keep us updated!
Headway is a pretty powerful bit of software under the hood – and now that I have the basics working, I’ll be setting up a hidden file to mess about and see what else I can accomplish. I’ll only implement the things I really like bit by bit over the next little while.
As for SEO and Thesis, I confess I do the basics here with page identification and link-work but because of Google link-decay on blogs, I don’t overly worry about it. Use the basics and forget about the rest. So my link structure isn’t date sensitive like most blogs and I do use some other basic stuff but I surely don’t worry about it. I save most of that for my websites. Headway takes care of a lot of it and I have a few plug-ins for other things.
Thanks, Doug, for your blog inspiration! I am in the process of beginning mine and may also use Headway. The learning curve is a bit overwhelming. Simple is good! As a designer, I appreciate your note about editing design applications. Use it when you need it, but not just because you can. I have a book coming out next June about garden design through Timber Press. Now it’s time to get back out in my garden…
@vanessa – I’ll look forward to reading your book! And I must say I probably make a better untrained garden designer than I do a blog designer. But each is a heck of a lot of fun and blog design doesn’t require a ton of hard shovel work.
I like the new theme. It’s nice that you kept it simple and not cluttered. I can be extremely difficult to mess around with someone’s theme to get it to look the way you really like it.
@pays to live green
that’s the advantage of this Headway theme – you configure it all yourself with drag and drop boxes. There’s a bit of a learning curve here but once you sort it out, it works really well and the way I look at it, I’ll simply change things on the fly from now on – a bit here, a bit there – playing around with it for the heck of it… or not. But so far, I really like the extreme simplicity compared to having to to learn php etc for other blog modifications.