I’ve stated before that I am a huge Thesis WordPress Theme fan. In fact, I only use Thesis on all of the new blogs that I start. Everyone talks about the obvious benefits of using Thesis like how customizable it is and the search engine optimization built into it. But I have found another huge benefit to using Thesis–I’m actually learning!

By education, I’m a lawyer. That’s about as far from coding as you can get. In the law, everything is about making an argument, playing devil’s advocate, and seeing both sides to an issue. It’s all gray. Coding is black and white. One comma means the difference between your site showing up or being a big blank error message. It’s right or it’s wrong. With no formal education in coding, I have to learn as I go.

Using Thesis, I am able to actually learn things like “hooks” and “css.” There are so many blog posts out there about customizing your Thesis installs that you can actually start to learn the coding just from reading them. In addition, the Thesis forum is so robust that you can read thread after thread about how different parts of the code works. When I reached the point that the blog posts and forum started making sense to me, I knew that I was learning something about the actual coding.

I won’t proclaim to be an expert, but through using Thesis and all of the accompanying official and unofficial documentation, I am understanding how to edit headers and footers, modify css, and even move columns. It’s taking me from being a simple blogger with a basic theme to being able to make enough changes to my sites (and understand how those changes are being made) that I feel like the sites are really mine.  I have a long way to go, but I’m learning more each week. What has your experience with Thesis been like? Do you stick to the basic layout, modify it a little, or go all out to make it your own?

So why did I decide to use a Thesis Wordpress Theme for this blog? I’ve tried lots of different themes, some free and some not. I’ve done some customizing of various themes. The site of mine that I love the most (although it gets the least traffic and attention) is my chocolate site, www.chocolatepicnic.com. Why do I love it? Because it’s pretty! Compared to all of my other sites, I think it came together the best. I used Revolution on some other sites, as well as Cutlines. But Thesis was the easiest to customized and sharpest looking.

Because I already had one Thesis license, I could upgrade to the “developer” license for only $77 and be able to use Thesis on as many of my sites as I want going forward. What a bargain!

I still have a lot to customize on here, but it looks 100 times better than it did 10 minutes ago. And by the end of the week, it will be beautiful (although maybe not as beautiful as Chocolate Picnic).

You can check out the These Theme for yourself at http://diythemes.com/thesis/.