Learn about Headway Theme for WordPress
Hey there, David Risley here with DAVIDRISLEY.com and I wanted to real quick show you what Headway looks like on the inside.
Now, Headway is actually a really cool theme that I believe takes on Thesis head on. I have not personally used Thesis as of yet. However, Headway, what seems to be its primary strength is the fact that it’s very user friendly and it gives you a lot of things that you can do directly from the interface, things that would require a little bit of coding knowledge and a lot of other themes. I just want to give you a quick overview of it here.
This is the Headway configuration screens that will gives you control over adding your scripts, your photo scripts. If you want to put in Google analytics for example, you just paste that code right here. Your favorite con, location, if you want to sell headways and affiliate you can throw your link in there.
We head over to navigation. You have full drag and drop control over your top navigation. What pages, you can also rename them. If I don’t like the word about David, I can just take the word “David” off and rename it about. And I don’t actually have to change the title of that page inside of Wordpress. I can just change it in the menu. It is very, very cool
Bunch of search engine, optimization options here that are built right in including the title bars, the description, made a keywords etcetera, etcetera. A lot of stuff that you might need to install the all in one SCL plug and something like that for is all built right in to Headway so you don’t really need to do it.
Now the social networking tab is quite cool because basically Headway will auto tweet your new Blog post for you which is something as pretty much over and above a theme. I mean it’s actually pretty cool. So, you could control the format of your tweet, the URL etcetera, etcetera.
Now, running over to the design area which we start to get into what I view as the best features of Headway, you can select your style which you get the default which is going to be the format style. And then if you want to have total full control over Headway, you can go down to the barebones or complete barebones and really put in all of your own CSS.
Now, just a note if you choose the default, that’s perfectly fine. You’ll use the default style sheet that comes with Headway but you can still modify it to your heart’s content by using the custom style sheet option so there’s no a big deal. You can control the size of your site. You can control your header whether you want the menu inside or outside you header area. You want to have a header image. You just put the URL to your logo right here. You could set a spacing, break runs are built right in. You can control all the information with how your post made the information display. This is the kind of thing you would have to normally, manually edit the theme to control. And here you can do the entire thing right from the interface.
You can control all your fonts, all of your colors, header, and navigation. These are just borders, background, text colors, link colors, header colors etcetera, etcetera, and etcetera. And the cool thing is you don’t need to know these little color X code. When you click, you get a nice little color theme which you can just choose it. So again, it’s nice and user friendly.
Okay. Let’s go down to the layout editor. Now this is a really, really cool thing of Headway and something that thesis does not do. Let’s for example select the layout for my Blog index which is going to be the home page. What you could do is control the layout of these pages by leafs. So you can see we’ve got the content on the left side and in the primary side bar. If I wanted to have a side bar in the right side, I could just drag it over and it’s done.
If I want to make the sidebar a little bit wider, just click on the 280 which is the current width and I just change that. But you can also add other leafs in about leaf that aren’t supposed, a text leaf if you just want to have just run an HTML such as your option form you can just add that as leaf. Just cancel this, drag it over. Let’s see. Got to play around with a little bit of the dragging and dropping here but you get the idea. We just drag and drop this thing.
What we probably needed to do is increase the height of this content area but you got dgar and drop control over the layout and you’ve got all of your pages over here. You can do the same exact thing with but also all the system pages like you single post, your category, your archives page, you author archives and you can do the exact same layout control.
The easy a hoops are basically just like Thesis, Headway has branch of hoops throughout the themes that will allows you to add on custom stuff. But with the Headway, you actually have this texture boxes which you can easily enter in your own HTML code to go into each of this hooks. So it gives you for example I’ve got this before header link and you can see only just pull up the Blog here to show you what I’ve done just by playing around with.
I start to make this thing look like the old layout of DAVIDRISLEY.com and this is using—I just basically took this HTML for this header area and I put it into this hook and the stall sheets that go in to this are part of my custom stall sheet for Headway. So, it’s just goes to show that you can take a lot of control over Headway just simply both via the interface. You don’t have to know that much code at all. And unless you want to get particularly advanced with your customization, you really don’t need to know any coding at all to really have a lot of format control of you Blog without knowing any code.
So that’s basically the basics of Headway. I just wanted to show you what the inside of it looks like and I think that if you are not a coder which phase that most bloggers or not but yet you want to have a lot of control over the look and field of your blog then I do recommend you check out Headway.
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