StudioPress has grown into being one of my favorite theme frameworks, with it’s Genesis theme. Developed by Brian Gardner, it’s always undergoing updates, adding features, making it a formidable choice for your site.
Genesis is the framework and operates as the main theme, giving your site a solid foundation, and lots of functionality to draw on for layouts, menus, widgets and on some themes, even color choices.
There are many, many child themes to choose from. The way the child theme works, is like this: you install both the Genesis theme and your chosen child theme, then you activate the child theme. The child theme makes changes to layout, look and feel, overall design, but taps into the power of the Genesis framework for functionality.
Not all child themes use all the available functionality – since different child themes are better for different types of sites. Some are more suited to blogging or reporting news and information, some are magazine style, some are great as a business site or portfolio site. The best thing about them, is their ability to be customized through widgets, plugins and other changes to functions and css. Some changes don’t require you to know any html or css.
All of the StudioPress themes offer a choice of layout settings, configurable on each post or page. Some offer special page templates as well, giving you more flexibility.
StudioPress also makes use of the featured image for each page/post which really dresses up your category and other archive pages.
SEO is also built in to this theme – but it does differ from using a plugin like Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. The theme does provide for SEO with fields for the various elements, some may prefer the additional control that comes from the plugin.
Genesis provides a Theme Settings page in your WordPress dashboard. This settings page will have settings specific to the child theme you are using along with the standard Genesis settings. You’ll find the following types of things there:
- Color choice for the theme – if your theme has one.
- Fields for custom feeds
- Default layout selection
- Navigation settings for menus
- Breadcrumbs
- Comments, content archives, blog page settings
- Header and footer scripts (for javascripts for various things, like analytics, etc.)
Genesis also provides an import/export for all of the theme specific settings – you can save lots of time, if you’re working on multiple sites.
Design-wise, I really like the look of the Genesis themes, they are clean, easy to read, and look good as they come. With design tweaks like backgrounds and headers or logos they really shine.
Get the Genesis theme by StudioPress.
