Tag: premium

In my Premium Series I’m taking a look at Premium WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that I personally use, either for myself and for others. All opinions are my own and not influenced by affiliate commissions or anyone connected to the product.

Headway is a WordPress theme that has a unique Visual Editor that lets you easily change the layout and look and feel of your blog right in front of your eyes. This makes it simple to change colors and fonts, and completely removes the need for any coding. There is a learning curve in how the system works and what the options do, and it’s not perfect (yet) in a few ways (nothing is), but is a fantastic option for the non-technical blogger.

I like it so much I use it on this site and a few others that I own, as well as for many clients, mainly because it’s so flexible and versatile.

If I want a different layout for every page, I can have one no problem. If I want different sidebars I can have them. If I don’t want to do any coding I don’t have to, but if I do there are easy hooks and a live CSS editor and other goodies to allow me to do the complicated stuff I need to do without any extra hassle.

Below is their demo video, which is obviously biased but does give you a good impression of how it aims to work.

The Headway Visual Editor allows me to design my whole site, or just a page of my site easily. It works on the concept of Leafs, which are building blocks of your site. You can have a content leaf, to display the content, and a sidebar leaf to display a sidebar. You can create infinite combinations with these and different leafs, such as a Featured Posts leaf, an image rotator leaf, even a Twitter leaf, amongst others.

It even has a quick start wizard that, once you upload your logo, will suggest colors to match for the rest of your site, and you can drag those colors to the elements you want to use them for. It’s unique and pretty slick.

It does take some getting used to, like WordPress itself or any new piece of software. But I think once you get into it, you’ll never look back, I honestly do.

There are free upgrades and it works with WordPress Multi-Site so you can install it once but use on multiple sites on the same WordPress installation. However you don;t need to get that complex, a personal license allows use on two sites you own.

Overall I’ve recommended Headway a lot to people, and while some have preferred simpler themes, those with needs to do squeeze pages, sales pages, home pages with sliders, and good old blog posts, all on the one site, have loved it. Hey, if I use 10 different themes a day, every day, and I choose to use Headway, it can’t be bad, can it?!