Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Using Thesis

You are very welcome Elaine! In no time you will be dancing with the stars.

Glad to help, Kendall. What’s been your biggest hurdle with your site design so far?

Thanks Armen! I’m glad you like the favicon. I also like the Thesis community because I think they’re super helpful to new people. I’ve set up about 4 sites using Thesis and the first three I just gritted my teeth the whole way through because the learning curve was so high. Since then, I feel a lot more comfortable and want to try to help other people get to that point as quick as possible as well.

Hey Mike, thanks for letting me know you like the site design so far! I really appreciate it. The fixed bg image is easy, just set the position to fixed in your custom.css. Also, there is a great tutorial about how to make full page headers and footers at kristarella’s site. I have a link in my sidebar called Credit with links to it if you want to check it out. I’ll write up the twitter box soon but I want to keep working on it first. I think I’m still missing something with it.

Hi Tresna, thanks for letting me know that you’re enjoying the Thesis tips, I really appreciate it! It took me a loooooong time to feel comfortable using css. In fact, my first 3 sites were bad because I just couldn’t figure out how to make sense of all the code, not to mention the php. Most of the tutorials I write are an attempt for me to simplify something that at one time seemed really complicated. Anyway, I hope you get your site set up soon and send me a link so I can take a look.

Hey Rob, very good question. As a person who is self taught in CSS and PHP, it can be a struggle to get the hang of these new foreign languages, especially if you’re used to WYSIWYG editors. If you want to approach it like a class, you could check out resources like this: CSS References.

However, since there is SOOO much information, I think it’s too much to digest in one setting. What I did when I was learning how to use CSS and PHP with Thesis was to go to the DIY forums and read every post that contained a snippet of code that I found interesting. I’d then copy and paste it into my custom files and see what happened. Shortly, patterns began to emerge within the code and I learned how to do the basics like change colors and add functions and built from there.

But I’m leaving one important thing out: I’ve been trained how to troubleshoot and problem solve for a long time. When the code doesn’t work, I know how to take it apart and see what’s broken. But I know that everyone is not like that, and sometimes I think people get a better ROI by focusing on running their businesses or writing content for their site instead of spending hours trying to learn code.

Hey Rob, here are two good resources for SEO as it pertains to Thesis. One and Two

There are really only about 5 places where you need to worry about inputting your seo-friendly content and the above tuts will walk you through it.

I might be in the minority, but I think that if you don’t want to learn code because you have more important things to do with you work/business then you shouldn’t do it. If you know exactly what needs to be done to your site you can just contract the work out to css and php pros. Anyone worth their salt should be able to complete your project and deliver it to you while you focus on the core of whatever it is that you do.

I’ve got some thesis basics here that will teach you some userful tweaks, and you can also find a lot of good info here.

That’s a great point about Flickr, Dani. Yes folks, send an email to the photo’s owner and let them know that you’d like to use their work. It’s a compliment, after all and people generally love to see how their work has been used. I know that I really love it when I find a site that’s built something using one of my tutorials and I wish everyone would let me know when they use them. For those interested, you can find more info on the creative commons license including limitations here.

Hey John, since you’ve used MAMP to set up a local Thesis site I’m assuming that you’ve dealt with three primary things: custom.css, custom_functions.php and your custom>images folder. To move these to live pages all you have to do is copy the custom files and add the custom>images to the live site’s custom>images folder. Once the two custom files are moved and you have all the images placed on your server your client will be able to see all the changes you make to their site in real time. One thing to watch out for (besides browser compatibility) is that your local/MAMP version of Thesis and WP is the same as what’s on your or the client’s server. This might not be so much of an issue now but back when Thesis-15 was upgraded to Thesis_151 some devs found that their sites broke down due to abs path problems and Theme/WP compatibility issues. Hope that helps!