I’ve been researching themes for a while now and I’ve never been as awestruck as when I first met the Genesis framework. Here I’ll give you some pointers as to why Genesis is the best thing since sliced bread!

First, let’s get one thing out of the way – why do we call it “a framework”? Well, let’s use a visual metaphor. If we see WordPress as the core of the site, the engine that the site runs on, Genesis is the main set of nuts and bolts that get the thing moving. Then you will use child themes to change the outside of the product – your design and layout. You will put a child theme on top of the parent Genesis theme – the parent theme is where all the main updates happen, while you can keep the changes you’ve made to the child theme independent. This is an option quite a few themes have, but what makes Genesis different is the huge amount of child themes you can use. As Genesis is really popular, it also has a great community and knowledgeable support – so there are a lot of developers that build upon the framework and give us, regular users, a lot of freedom and flexibility.

One of the core features that sets Genesis apart is its use of code “hooks”. Most other themes give you some customization options and widgets and going from there, there isn’t much you can do in terms of placing specific elements on the website. Genesis uses “hooks” that you can use to place elements in your site. So if you want to place an element before your footer, it’s as simple as using the hook “genesis_before_footer”. You see, now you can easily decide where to put the author bio or social media sharing buttons, without coding extensively or wasting time with plugins that don’t always work as expected. There’s a great guide on hooks that I highly recommend over at Genesis Tutorials – it shows just how many placement options you now have. You will have much more control over your website.

Hooks also help clean up the theme code so that it loads much faster and isn’t bloated. Usually, including customization options in the theme you use actually creates unnecessary files in the theme for layout and color options and may bloat up your database – Genesis helps with that and makes your site super lean and clean.

Genesis is created with HTML 5 mark-up and Schema.org microdata – this facilitates your SEO work and will help your positioning. Schema.org explains to search engines what your content contains, which helps your SEO efforts. The framework has built-in SEO options and is optimized for use together with the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast, giving you a bit of an SEO head-start on other bloggers.

The multitude of Genesis child themes is important to highlight – the main point here, as already explained, is that you will only make changes to the child theme without altering the parent Genesis code. This is how you achieve a lot of visual freedom and a level of control. Whether you’re looking for a more romantic feel with Lovely or a classic look with Avett, you will be able to choose your own favorite out of many child theme options and use it easily.

So, here are some of the reasons we love Genesis framework – just give it a try and you’ll see for yourself! Don’t have the time to build or manage your new website, or maybe design and coding is not for you? Try out our partners at WP Support Center to custom design and maintain your WordPress website.

Check out the Ideas theme here!

The Ideas theme by AppThemes – not to be confused with the theme of the same name by Themeforest author Imaginem, is a versatile WordPress theme that can be used to gather consumer feedback to better develop your products and ideas. The Ideas theme allows for customers to suggest and then vote on ideas around your products or services. Ideas is easy to set up and use which makes it an excellent addition to any business wanting to gather customer feedback from an audience.

There are many applications for the Ideas theme that can benefit a wealth of company niches, for example: a video game company can utilize the theme as a means for gamers to share tips and tricks for a trending video game. WordPress theme developers could utilize the Ideas theme as a means to gather feedback on features to add or bugs to address with upcoming updates on a current theme. On a more simple note, the Ideas theme could be used as a means to gather customer feedback for future product line suggestions which would allow a company to expand their product offerings by catering to “in demand” product ideas. As you can see, the applications of the Ideas theme are endless!

Ideas Theme Features

The Ideas theme is built with productivity in mind. Utilizing an efficient layout, Ideas offers a feedback system in which customers can not only tell you what they think about existing products and suggest other products, but they can also vote on concepts submitted by other customers too. Here are some features worth highlighting:

● The Ideas theme allows moderation of all submitted concepts to ensure full user control of the site while also still providing the opportunity for customer interaction.
● AJAX and jQuery implementation mean that votes for approved ideas are updated instantly without a page refresh which makes for a great user experience – something which is especially important when trying to gather feedback
● Extended user profiles allow for back-end and front-end viewing of detailed voting activity for each user. This allows you to keep track of productive contributors to your website as well as to link directly to those who contribute the most successful concepts based on customer feedback.
● The Ideas theme offers an API which allows developers to build on to the theme itself to customize its functionality. This means that should you ever want to build your own app based on your site, the app will easily be able to communicate with your site using the API. This opens up a whole new way for you to expand your website to mobile users and expand your customer base.

Pro’s of the Ideas Theme

● Ideas submitted via the Ideas theme can be filtered and sorted easily by votes and responses on the front-end of a site while they can be filtered by author, date, category and status in the admin dashboard. This makes searching through and organizing customer ideas fast and easy so that you can quickly find the most popular submissions made to your site and act on them.
● The Ideas theme is a responsive theme that supports a touch swipe slideshow feature and utilizes retina display images. These two features open up your website to mobile users who make up a significant portion of web surfers these days.
● Ideas offers a variety of submission formats to accommodate various types of idea submission, these include support for YouTube content, Vimeo content, Photowall and Slideshow options. This is an important aspect in terms of the theme’s versatility because it allows for users to submit ideas based on a variety of media formats which will in turn allow you to diversify the products and services that your business can offer.
● The Ideas theme offers a transferable license to purchasers. This makes it easy for web developers to utilize the theme in design projects and transfer the license to the theme after the project is complete. Additionally, if your business is sold or taken over by another individual, a transferable license means that there will be no fees involved in the license transfer as is often the case with other themes.
● Ideas offers a translation ready platform which makes it particularly appealing for those who are looking to reach out to a multilingual or global audience. With a built in language translation for numerous languages, you are able to offer a multi-lingual website without the expense of having your website professionally translated. Being able to reach multi-lingual audiences means expanding your company’s reach as well as taking on culturally diverse user submissions!

● Log-in and sign-up pages are themed so they don’t look out of place. This may seem like a simple touch, but for many consumers a personalized touch is what they require to feel comfortable when doing business with a company. Personalizing pages puts a face to the name rather than providing a generic referral from a cookie cutter webpage.
● The Ideas theme has been validated with WC3 coding rules which ensures that the theme will not quickly become obsolete since it utilizes the most up to date coding. This is important because it means that your website theme will be able to keep up with upcoming updates to WordPress as well as newly released plug-ins that you may decide to consider adding to your site in the future.
● Ideas supports shortcodes. Shortcodes allow you to easily expand your theme’s layout by adding things such as drop down menus, formatted columns, and other design elements.
● A comprehensive admin panel in the dashboard allows you to edit the Ideas theme settings without having to weed through lines of PHP code. This means quick changes can be implemented without worrying about the potential of PHP errors that can be common when editing premium themes using the original PHP files.
Con’s of the Ideas Theme

● The Ideas theme can be a little overwhelming which can result in impatience on your part (trust me, I know.) This can easily be remedied by reading through the provided documentation of the theme BEFORE you begin meddling with settings.
● The Ideas theme requires its own WordPress installation, so you’ll want to keep that in mind if you are looking to incorporate it into an already existing site. Perhaps the easiest solution is to set up the site on a sub domain. For example ideas.yoursite.com. If the use of a sub domain does not suit your needs I recommend taking a look at utilizing another theme of your choice and implementing the WP Idea Stream plug-in to enable idea submission for your consumers.
● Ideas offers fewer “frills” than other themes which is simply due to the fact that this theme was built for a very specific purpose whereas most themes are built to fit many different options. If you are looking for a more visually appealing website however, consider utilizing a sub-domain as mentioned above, so that your main website can be the face of your company while still having the Ideas theme for customer feedback.

Recommendation

The Ideas theme is a theme with a very specific use in that it is built with the sharing of ideas in mind. It incorporates functionality and interaction in to a platform that can be easily monitored and monetized for businesses in just about every niche. Whether you are looking to gather ideas for upcoming product lines, receive customer feedback on current product features (for example WordPress themes or plug-ins,) or even to create a forum where users can share suggestions and modifications based on their experiences with your products; the Ideas theme is perfect for improving sales by catering to consumers and encouraging exposure of your brand.

So, would I recommend the Ideas theme? Yes. It could serve as a wonderful bridge between consumers and companies by providing an interactive forum that does not require the monitoring of BBS message boards and avoids the anonymity and one way feedback of e-mail communication. The Ideas theme is one of the best solutions we’ve seen for gathering customer feedback that exists across any platform, WP or otherwise.

When it all comes down to it, Ideas theme by AppThemes provides you with audience polling that almost any company could benefit from. For a small fee, this theme now puts consumer polling in your hands. This theme is available from AppThemes for $99 for a standard license and $159 for a developer license. We recommend that you check it out!

Click Here to Check Out Ideas