The Most Amazing WordPress theme – Headway 1.5
November 14th, 2009 | by Conrad Walton |I’ve just made the most amazing discovery this morning.
Headway 1.5 Premium WordPress Theme
I’ve always built my own custom theme for any site I built. I’ve looked at Thesis and other “premium” themes and none of them could really do any better than I can by writing my own code.
…until now.
Today Headway released the latest version of their premium theme. It’s got the usual list of updated features and that’s all nice and good, but they also released a visual editor.
I’ve hated visual editors since I first used Dreamweaver 1.0. I don’t even use the one that’s built into WordPress.
This one is different.
This one has built is color pickers. You can resize any element on the page. You can add elements to the page. They call them “leafs”, but they are really just “divs” in CSS, which I used to code by hand. Now, I click, drag, drop, pick a color, pick a font. Save. I’m done. It has never been easier.
I think this is the first visual editor that actually works.
I think this is the first visual editor that actually works and my clients can understand how to use it.
My first concern is if it can do everything that I can do by hand. There are a couple tricky things with the layout that I can do, but this does 95% of anything I would ever want it to do. It will do 100% of everything that you will ever want it to do.
My other concern is if it will be easy enough to use. The most obvious stuff is amazingly simple to accomplish. There are some things that you have to learn a little code to do. It’s got the hooks so that if you know the code and want to go hard core on it, it will allow you to. If you have the knowledge, you can do anything. If you don’t know the code, you don’t know the things that you can’t do. It’s that powerful.
If the biggest cost to building a WordPress site is time, then this will cut your design time in half and save you money.
I can finally recommend a premium theme for WordPress and I’m the most cynical guy you’ll meet when it comes to new stuff like this. If you are looking for a more powerful, easy to use way to customize your own WordPress blog, you need to check out Headway.
Do it now.
Tags: Building Web Sites, Color Pickers, Discovery, Element, Elements, Font, Freedom, Hard Core, Headway, Hooks, Knowledge, Stuff, Thesis, Visual Editors, Wordpress Theme
I don't want to offend all the Toyota owners. 
Hey Conrad,
I checked out the headway site and then read a few reviews (one of them yours). The promo vid they have made ‘says’ a lot of the things it can do but only demonstrates the VERY basic stuff.
Do you know of any great sites that have been built with headway?
I don’t know that I would call it “great”, but I built this site with headway: http://www.youcansellcrafts.com/
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You might be an affiliate so this might not show, but…
I recently purchased Headway 1.5.6 and let me tell you, I have had great frustration trying to figure things out.
The documentation assumes you already know the previous version and all the video tutorials are for the older versions and this version’s visual editor doesn’t resemble AT ALL any tutorial I’ve seen.
They never should have released this latest version without video tutorials because it is NOT intuitive and will NOT have you up and running in 15 minutes. In fact this is my third day and I still can’t figure out basic site configuration.
The old tutorials show this eloquently. They just don’t resemble anything in the new version. It seems they took a giant step backward.
I am considering downloading the old version simply because it looks easier to understand.
Sorry if I’ve hurt anyone’s feelings, but at $87 bucks, I expected to be happy, not tearing my hair out.
Okay, after having written what I did about version 1.5.6, I downloaded their “legacy” version (1.1). It’s a piece of cake to work with! I’ve been very productive and admit I haven’t needed to consult any documentation or view any tutorials (yet)! And that says a lot.
I like the functionality even though there is a lot that I do not know (like what certain stuff does), everything that I’ve needed to get done, I’ve been able to!
The Legacy version is the best WordPress program I’ve had so far (out of five). Unfortunately the 1.5.6 version was a very, very bad move. I fully recommend the older version! The newest one needs to be withdrawn, quickly.