I hate wasting my client’s money. While it’s not always in my best interest I feel it’s my moral responsibility. Recently one client hired an SEO guru to build their WordPress blog site. Nothing wrong here. The problem is that the guru demanded that I build the site’s theme with Thesis.
Thesis is a theme framework for WordPress that offers some standard SEO functionality and it has a nominal charge associated with it. There are two key parts here: theme framework and SEO functionality. Since I’m developing the theme and I’m fluent with PHP, HTML and CSS using a framework will just slow me down and waste my client’s money. I brought this concern to my client and the guru sent a large email touting all the benefits of Thesis for SEO.
Thesis handles meta tags, integrates with twitter and feedburner and a few other SEO related items. For a theme, this is actually pretty cool but not revolutionary. Everything Thesis does can be handled by a free plugin. If you search the internet for Thesis, however, you’ll find blog post after blog post describing how amazing Thesis is for SEO without actually saying why it’s so good.
Thesis will not help your site rank better in search engines any better than the top free WordPress SEO plugins. It won’t make it any easier and it’s not even as full featured as free alternatives.
I voiced my concerns again, was overruled by the guru and ended up having to charge the client far more than it should have to make a WordPress theme.