Wordpress Themes and Plugins – A Maintenance Nightmare

by excitedbylife on March 3, 2009

sem-theme-pro1-300x266 Our content management system of choice for excitedbylife.com is Wordpress. Maggie and I don’t have time to waste working out what plugins to install and when to upgrade them so we purchased a product called Semiologic some time ago. Semiologic have picked out the most useful plugins and keep them up to date for you via automatic updates you can initiate. There are over 70 tools and plugins included each heavily tested and bug fixed by an active member base.

Some of the feature include

  • one-click feature customization,
  • advanced page templates,
  • built-in SEO,
  • ad management,
  • newsletter subscriptions,
  • visitor tracking,
  • author images,
  • podcasting,
  • video casting,
  • comment subscriptions,
  • spam control,
  • advanced caching

Despite all it’s feature and advanced templates for themes the Semiologic creators are really developers not designers, so although the resulting blogs may win an SEO award they won’t win any design awards. With this in mind we decided to purchase a premium theme. After some research it seemed that a lot of big name bloggers such as copy blogger were using the Thesis theme. So we did our bit to help the world economy out of recession and purchased Thesis. You are now viewing the finished result, and we have yet to start any customizations.

As you can see the design is clean and simple and highly SEO optimized. But it’s biggest benefit is that it is not only a theme but a complete theme customization system. This means we will be able to use it to create unique themes for all our future blogs as well. A nice cost saving.

Please note both Semiologic and Thesis are not cheap but when we worked out how much time we spent downloading and installing plugins and trying to find unique themes I think they are worth the cost and together they make the perfect combination.

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