I’ll admit it, this site was looking pretty sad. We had the old theme on it for what felt like quite a lot of years now and it needed to go. We uploaded another theme for a little while but really I wasn’t too happy with it either and since we were concentrating on our craft site, I didn’t have time to get in and change it.
So here we are today, and the site looks all brand new and shiny again. We have decided on the Authority Pro theme by Genesis and I love it.
I have to admit though that when I first uploaded it I wasn’t really enamored with it. You know what it’s like when you upload a new theme – the site looks like a mess, but even after an hour or so of playing with it, I still wasn’t all that happy. I was going to delete it but persevered for a bit longer and it was only when I spent a couple of hours getting the post featured photos looking right that it all came together. Now I just love it.
The site still needs a bit of work but the basics of it are there and it is looking good. I love those large images at the top of each post. It’s all looking quite professional. Wanda liked it so much she is using the same theme on her travel site.
A bit about the Genesis Framework and why we use it…
We’ve been using the Genesis Framework for some years now and we continue to do so. It’s robust, search engine optimized, well coded and they even brought in a security expert to make sure the theme was as secure as possible.
Basically the Genesis Framework works by first uploading the Genesis Framework theme and you upload like you would any other theme. Then you grab one of the Genesis child themes and upload that as well. This means that when there is an update to the Genesis Framework, you don’t lose any changes you have made since any changes you have made have been done to your child theme.
We purchased the Pro-Plus All-Theme Package back in 2013 which includes the Genesis Framework and all of the child themes plus any future ones they create. So we have a constant supply of themes that we can choose from…there are over 100 in our account at this point. In the past, they would also have Third Party themes available but they were at an extra cost and of course they were always the ones we wanted. However, I logged in earlier this year and noticed they were all included as part of the Pro-Plus pack now…bonus!!
What we found disappointing in the past with the Genesis Framework was the lack of pretty child themes. They focused mostly on techie or masculine style themes, but I have noticed quite a number of feminine looking themes now which is awesome. I think they must have realized that there is a big market in female bloggers out there who are looking for prettier themes.
Our Favourite Genesis Themes
We have some favourite Genesis themes. We used to use the Lifestyle theme on all of our sites when we first started with Genesis. We also used the Prose theme and this we really liked because it had a lot of options to enable you to make changes to the theme without having to touch code. I notice however that although this theme is still sitting in my account, they haven’t updated it since 2013 and it’s not available publicly. I get the feeling that this might be because of their Design Palette Pro plugin which basically does the same thing but at an additional cost. The benefit of the plugin is that you can use it on more than one theme plus it looks like there are a whole lot more options available with the plugin.
These days we still use both the Lifestyle theme and the Prose theme on a number of our sites but we are also just started using the Mai Lifestyle Pro theme. This is an awesome theme and was voted the #2 best selling Genesis theme for February and March 2018. It’s jam packed with features and you can do so much with it.
And of course, we have just started using the Authority Pro theme.
So all in all, we are happy we went with the Pro Plus Theme Package. It’s served us well over the years and allowed us to keep upgrading to new themes as they become available.
Yes! Looks much better – nice and clean!
Thanks Monja. ‘Clean’ is the right word for it. Genesis themes just make everything look good.
I have Genesis too and am using a third party child theme called Daily Dish Pro.
I have the Authority theme too but don’t think I’m using it on anything. I really like how it looks on here.
I LOVE that Mai Lifestyle theme. I can see why it was voted so high.
I like the Daily Dish theme. We were tossing up whether to use it for a website at one point but ended up with something else. It looks great on your site. These themes have a clean professional look to them which I really like.
I use Divi Theme which is easy to play with. Another reason is that all Elegant Themes full package including their plugins came with my European hosting. There was no need for another purchases. I’m happy you are back again.
I’m glad to be back too. I really missed this site but now we have a bit more time for other things I can spend a lot more time here.
I like the look of the Divi theme. They say that it is the most used WordPress theme in the world. Looks really easy to customise too so I can see why it is so popular.
I can’t get my post picture to go all the way across the page, my front paragraph is no longer scripted, and the side social menu will not show. Super frustrating. oh and it shows log in in my footer.