If you’re shopping for a new theme, you’ve no doubt heard the following names:
These are no doubt the most popular and robust frameworks on the market today. And they all seriously rock. But I’m still using Genesis to design websites, and I thought I’d explain why.
Genesis is not the most intuitive of all these premium frameworks, but in my opinion – it is still the best theme on the market.
Once you go to Divi, you can’t go back
Let’s chat about Divi for a moment. It’s a drag and drop type theme that allows anyone – even without coding knowledge or experience – to create an impressive looking website in a short period of time. The only problem?
In the backend, there is a lot of shortcode going on, which means if you decide to change themes down the line, your site will essentially have to be rebuilt. With Genesis, when you activate a new child theme, you still see all your content, it’s just styled differently. But if you activate a new theme after Divi, your pages will revert to a bunch of code.
Speed
As with any drag and drop theme, the frameworks are just not as fast. The extra programming needed to create an extensive backend means your site is not going to zip around as fast as a framework like Genesis. Speed is still an incredibly important factor in site ranking and ultimately…your ability to monetize.
Security
If anyone has had a site hacked, they know the panic and frustration that comes with malware problems. Genesis is one of the most secure frameworks because they adhere to all the WordPress best practices and hired security expert Mark Jaquith to help make sure their themes are as rock solid as possible.
SEO
The SEO functionality that is built into Genesis is impressive. You can create custom titles, keywords, meta descriptions, and employ redirects all right from the WordPress edit screen. And if you decide to go to another service {like Yoast}, Genesis automatically removes their SEO from your site to avoid any plugin conflicts.
Plays well with others
Speaking of conflicts, Genesis {since the code is so efficient and minimal} plays well with almost any plugin you can imagine! With thousands of plugins on the market, I have yet to run into one that had issues running on the Genesis framework.
Amazing customer service
Their knowledge base is unparalleled. Once you buy the theme, you have it forever. And as a designer? I can use all my themes on unlimited sites, which saves you – the client – money.
Complete Customization
So here’s where the rubber meets the road for a lot of people. They want to have the ability to customize their theme, and therefore, the drag and drop themes seem more appealing.
And to some extent, themes like Divi can create layouts that would take a bit of coding knowledge to understand on Genesis. HOWEVER, and that’s a big however, Genesis is designed to do anything.
It’s got an impressive library of code snippets, plugins, hooks, custom widgets, and other actions to turn your site into whatever you can imagine in your head.
Genesis has stood the test of time
This is not to say that Divi, Headway, and others aren’t great options for the DIY businessperson. However, Genesis has shown time and time again, its ability to produce professional, lightweight, beautiful and functional websites. It may not be the trendy option at the moment, but it’s still a smart one.
Yes, Genesis is for websites too
There is an idea floating around the Internet that Genesis is too minimal and designed only for bloggers. This is not true. In fact, you can take any child theme they make and within one hour, have a grid-type landing page if you wish.
And that is something I’d like to show you how to do…
But a simple blog post isn’t enough.
I have an 8 week workshop specifically for people who want to learn how to use Genesis child themes!
For a complete listing of my favorite Genesis child themes, you can check it out on my website.
