Building Small Business Websites With Thesis and WordPress

WordPress and Thesis are a powerful combination for building great websites. Some of the hottest blogs today are using Thesis, with new ones converting over every day.

But did you know that you can use Thesis and WordPress to create highly effective small business websites that get great local search results too?

Why Thesis?

In addition to my SmallBiz WordPress theme, the Thesis theme is a valuable tool in my toolbox for building small business websites.

Thesis provides some powerful capabilities that help you build websites that both look good and perform well in the search rankings.

First of all, it is based on WordPress, which is a powerful foundation for building a small business website that is easy to update and search engine friendly.

And Thesis brings benefits to the table over and above that:

• Built-in SEO capabilities. You can set your page title, meta description and keywords for the entire site, and over-ride them on a page-by-page basis.
• Infinite customization. Thesis allows you to add content before or after any section, for the entire website. For example, adding your business address to the footer of every page is a good idea for local search optimization. Thesis enables this and the free OpenHook plug-in makes it easy to do this without any coding.
• Elegant design and readable typography. The out of the box design is simple and elegant. Maybe too simple for some tastes, but the opportunities for customization are compelling. And the typography is set up to be very clear and easy to read. So many of the themes I see have basic Arial and other Sans Serif fonts that are too small to read and are not used consistently throughout the site.
• Powerful options panel. The Thesis Options panel makes it easy to change almost anything on the site – from the number of columns to the font sizes, feature areas, and many other things.
• Easy upgrades. The theme was architected so that all of your code and style changes can be isolated to a single directory. That means when you need to back up your changes or upgrade the theme, all you need to do is save the /custom directory and your upgrade is completely seamless.
• Great support. Thesis has a thriving community, including a support forum that is monitored by a crack staff, a Twitter hashtag (#thesiswp) and many blogs that cover the theme. This means it is easy to get your questions answered quickly.

But What Are The Drawbacks?

The power of Thesis is its flexibility. The design is clean and simple, and a great starting point for customization. By simply adding a header graphic and a few pages you can have a professional looking website.

But the out of the box styling is too simple and plain for many people’s taste. It does require some customization to get it to look unique. So for people who do not want to take on a little bit of work, they might be better served by a theme that has more visual “pop” out of the box.

So if you are a small business owner looking to build a professional website for your business, or a consultant who helps small business owners, take a look at WordPress, and the Thesis theme and decide if it is right for you:

Thesis Demo Site — See the Thesis Theme in action!

Free eBook Guide – Thesis for Small Business Websites

I’ve put together a lot of small business websites using WordPress, and many of them with Thesis. So I wrote this guide to share some of the things I learned. If you are interested in learning how to set up websites with Thesis, this guide will walk you through it step-by-step.

This free 37-page guide walks you through installing WordPress, installing the Thesis theme, and configuring them both to create a professional website for your small business.
 
 

Tagged as: small business website, Thesis WordPress Theme, wordpress theme