Beschuit Club

1) Headway Review

Currently I’m experimenting with a new WordPress Theme Frame, named Headway. After having tried to get Thesis 2.0.3 working to no avail and having seen other people making the move to Headway, I believe it is time to move.

I’ll use this post for some notes of problems/glitches I encounter.

I’m not giving any link juice here to them until I’m satisfied the theme does what I want it to do.

2) First Impressions

a) Documentation

The biggest #fail with the launch of the Thesis 2.0 version was the total lack of documentation, while it tries to do the same as Headway does: Enabling you to visually design your blog lay-out in a relatively simple way.

Headway has fairly good documentation in place in a wiki like manner.

I only wish I would have known where to find it before I bought it. My suggestion to Headway would be to put a significant link on their home page to their codex to enable non-members to read in.

b) Forum

It seems that they don’t use specific forum software for their support forum, but rather a separate blog, which makes it a bit awkward to navigate. On the other hand it seems less clumsily organized than the Thesis Forum.

c) Not so stylish

From a stylish point of view I’m not very impressed with the lay out of Headway’s own website. I don’t like orange in the greyish way they use it. Nor am I very impressed with the examples they show of websites using their theme (yet maybe).

Especially the style of the Editor wit a blackish background with a not so readable light colored font is un stylish.

3) Minus Points

a) Unable to use the media library in the visual editor fully

I’ve been fudzing around while trying to get a header image in place.

When you want your header to be an image without text, but with a link to your homepage, It actually is really simple in Headway. Somewhere in the gridmode you will be asked to upload an image and you can disable the name and tag of the blog. It took me some time to realize just how simple it is. First I had the header removed and replaced by a text block, but that didn’t work.

However, when I tried to use an image from the image gallery, I got the screen telling me there is an error.

The way around it is to upload it from your computer. I have a feeling that Headway is not completely compatible with the newest WordPress version 3.5 yet.

b) Unable to preview a post when you’re editing a post

When I want to preview this post while editing I’m getting a blank screen…

It may be this is due to the fact that you need to design a special preview page.

c) Standard lay out is showing excerpts

I don’t like excepts. I tried to use the standard WordPress settings to no avail. Took quite some time to find it in the visual editor grid mode, press the content box button and look at type .

d)The Wrapper

It has cost me a lot of time to get the top of the blog where I want it: At the top of the screen. You can find it under wrapper….

4) Plus points

a) Easy standard lay out

Positive is you can start from scratch with a one, two or three column lay out and Headway is based on the 960 grid.

b) Basically easy to replace the Header with an image

As mentioned above. It is easy to replace name and tagline of your blog with an image if you know where to look.

c) Easy Implementation of Code Boxes

I crave my paginator navigation. You can add it with a hook before content, but you also can put it in a separate code box and give it exact measures. With Thesis 2.0 it has cost me 2 days to figure it out. With headway a couple of hours.

d) Responsive grid

After having designed the site I tried to load it on my blackberry and I was pleasantly surprised to see how it seamlessly resized. Much better than I’ve seen any Thesis theme do thusfar.

-/-/-

Last edited by admin on January 10, 2013 at 10:08 pm