Tag: headway

Blog Tech Guy Now Runs On Headway

You probably haven’t noticed (at least I hope not) but the Blog Tech Guy website now runs off the Headway theme for WordPress. Headway tries to take the programming and technical challenges out of customizing a theme and each version it gets better and better.

Headway Themes — Manage your website with drag and drop layout editing and more!

My design is a wonderful custom design by Nate from Unique Blog Designs and I didn’t want to lose that. With Headway I didn’t have to and hopefully not many people have noticed that I’ve even moved.

So why switch?
There were a few reasons. Being a geek I wanted to see if it was possible. Not just from a technical standpoint but from my own abilities. I customize sites all the time for clients and I wanted to see if what I thought I could do, I could. I’m glad to say I was right!

I also recommend Headway to a lot of people and I wanted to get more hand on experience on how it works and what it does when you ask it to do something. I also wanted to see how easy it was for others to change elements. With 1.7 things are getting easier and easier, and more intuitive.

Can you transfer your site to Headway?
I’ll be lying if I said my transfer was easy. It was straightforward, I had a list of things that needed to be done, and with a few minor hiccups I achieved them. But it wasn’t easy and took about 6 hours. However it’s unlikely that you will be transferring to Headway and wanting to keep exactly the same theme as you have now, like I have. The beauty of Headway is that you can easily make a different layout or design to what you have now and you have ultimate control over colors, fonts, layouts and more.

You can see a video of me taking a quick look at the new features for Headway 1.7 (early September) below. Additional features include a quick start wizard, leaf templates, automatic upgrades, SEO improvements, speed increases and much much more.

Headway 1.7 Theme Sneak Preview

For those of you who like this stuff, I’ve recorded a sneak preview of the upcoming Headway 1.7 theme.

Headway tries to take the programming and technical challenges out of customizing a theme and each version it gets better. The latest, 1.7 adds a number of features, a few of which I’ll take you through in my unpolished rambling video below (no hard sell from me!). For those who want to read the benefits, see below the video.

Quick Start Wizard
The wizard will guide you step-by-step through choosing your layout, uploading your header image, building your site’s color scheme (it will even detect colors from your header image – I can’t wait to give that a go!), and selecting fonts. At the end, you’ll click a button to build your site and it’ll all be done in a few seconds.
This is one of the best features I’ve seen in any premium WordPress theme, ever.

Automatic Upgrades
“No longer do you have to go to the Headway site, download the latest version, upload it, and activate it. Oh, and if you ever did any custom.css or used the custom folder in Headway, you won’t have to worry about transferring that to the new installation either. The automatic upgrader does it all with only a few clicks”
I’m honestly looking forward to testing this!

HUGE Speed Improvements and Optimizations
“We’ve made major improvements to the visual editor to drastically reduce the amount of conflicts from third-party plugins and also make loading the visual editor MUCH faster. Also, we completely rewrote the content leaf to be more efficient and more stable than before.”
It certain loads faster and is easier to navigate than before.

Column System For Leafs
“Those who have a more column-based layout will find the new columns system to be incredibly beneficial. Instead of jogging all of your leafs around, you can put them into columns and move and resize the entire columns with ease. Don’t fret, the previous layout system is still present. You can specify whether or not you want columns for the particular page in the visual editor.”
I’m sure this will become more useful as I develop more sites with Headway, columns were sometime problematic.

Styles Manager
Before Headway 1.7, Headway came with 1 layout and you had to work from there. Headway 1.7 comes with 4 pre-loaded styles in the new Styles Manager, which allows you to save and load styles. You can also import and export styles just like before, but in a much more organized way!
It’s quick and easy to use and makes default styling nice and easy.

Leaf Templates
Instead of linking pages and being locked into the layout of the page you are linking to, you can now save your leafs (and columns) into Leaf Templates. Leaf Templates can be loaded onto any page. Once a template is loaded, you can modify it just like any regular page.
Beautiful!

Looks great!

Theme Video Tutorials For WordPress Premium Themes

Using premium WordPress themes is great, but often you need to watch video tutorials of how to do something. There are lots of sites with different videos for different premium themes, so after constantly directing people all over the place for their theme tutorials I decided to put them all in one place. Theme Vids was born, a site housing all the best premium theme tutorial videos in a central location. I’ve put together a short video below so you can see how to use the site.

Each weekday a different video will be shown and so the category links to your theme and the search box may be your friend to find relevant tutorials. Currently I am just covering Headway, Thesis, Woo Themes, and Flexx, but if you want other premium theme videos added just contact me from the site and let me know. I’ll be adding any training videos I do to there too, so will be redirecting clients to it over the next few months.

I’m always happy for any feedback so please let me know what you think of the Theme Vids, and what can be improved.

Want A Free Premium Theme?

As an extra bonus, when you join the Income Blogging Guide Course, we will install a WordPress Premium Theme on your blog for free. More details are in the quick video below and the text afterwards.

Premium themes make the managing of your blog much, much easier. They are more flexible. They make changes to your blog much easier. They save you time and they improve the Search Engine Optimization of your blog.

And that’s why so many people buy them and rave about them.

But you don’t have to buy the premium theme… we will and we’ll install it for you as well…all for free, after you join the Income Blogging Guide Course

The premium themes on offer for free are:

The Headway Theme (value $87) – Click here for more information: Headway Theme

The Flexx Theme (value $79.95) – Click here for more information: Flexx Theme

This is an extra, unadvertised bonus on top of the 5 bonuses promised already.

All you have to do is come and join us at the Income Blogging Guide Course, choose which Theme you’d like and we’ll install it for you – all for free.

We also have the Thesis Theme on offer for just $40 including installation. If you were to purchase the Thesis Theme yourself it would cost you $87 plus installation.

You can have the one theme of your choice installed on an existing blog or a brand new blog…the choice is yours.

Now that’s a bonus worth having!

Join up now and get your extra bonus of a free premium theme. Here’s the link to join: Income Blogging Guide Course

The sales page doesn’t mention the free theme bonus but that’s because it is an unadvertised bonus (until now!).

Headway WordPress Theme Preview

Headway is a relatively new WordPress theme that attempts to simplify customizing your site with different colors and layouts, in an easy to use interface.

What is Headway?

Headway is a premium (aka paid-for) WordPress theme. It is designed for those who don’t have the time and/or knowledge to customize a theme using traditional coding methods, and instead gives them a easy to use tools, such as drag-and-drop and color-pickers, with which to easily redesign and customize their site. Even if you are a pro at this sort of thing, custom hooks and the usual custom CSS are also available.

The thing that will blow you away in the new version, is the Visual Editor – you can edit your site at the same time as seeing exactly what it will look like!

The video below shows a preview of how this works, prepare to be excited about the design opportunities for your blog! (click here if you can’t see the video)

I had a chance to meet some of the guys behind Headway at BlogWorldExpo, and they are excited about the brilliant customizable features in Headway, and have even more planned. As you would expect, any owners of Headway today will get access to new versions for no charge.

The version in the video is not quite ready for release, but you can get this easy WordPress theme here very soon.

If you want to promote Headway yourself and make some money, you can sign up as an affiliate here.

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