If you’ve ever read any of my posts here then you’ll know that I’m a big fan of all the wordpress themes that Chris Pearson has put out. Well recently he released a paid theme called Thesis that has some outstanding features. Last month after reading a great review from Sugarrae on Thesis I decided to buy the developers license. The developer option was a $164 but to me that was a bargain considering I could use it on unlimited sites and I’d get free theme updates forever.
Let me first start out by saying that the Thesis theme is everything that I thought it would be and more. Currently I’ve got my first site up and I was able to launch that with about only 5 hours of work and it looks great. If you’ve got some CSS knowledge then the sky is the limit when is comes to customizing Thesis. However if your not that strong with customizing CSS then don’t worry, because you can still build a great looking site.
One of the things that really impressed me with this theme was the options pane that comes built in with Thesis allowing you to really do some nice customizations with little or no effort at all. Chris really put some nice effort into making this extremely easy for everyone to use and I can’t wait to see some of the future enhancements that he’ll be coming out with. The second feature of this theme that really impresses me is the overall support. The thesis site has some great tutorials available and the community forum is amazing. It’s such an active forum that there is a great chance you’ll be able to find the answer that you’re looking for and everyone there is very responsive and you’ll get some great feedback.
How am I Using the Thesis Theme for WordPress?
I’ve got a few sites that utilize the PhpBay Pro wordpress plugin for the Ebay affiliate program. I’ve gone through countless free WordPress themes on these sites but I never really got the performance that I knew that I could achieve with some of the niches that I was targeting. Honestly I think that not many people would consider using Thesis for an Ebay affiliate site, but I thought there could be some potential there so I decided to give it a shot.
Website Bounce Rate Decreased by 38% with Thesis
Well so far I’ve configured one of my PhpBay Pro sites around the Thesis theme and the results have been absolutely fantastic. I’ve been running it for a few weeks now and my overall website bounce rate has decreased by 38% since I took the Thesis theme live. My site as also seen some huge increases in revenue since I launched with Thesis, currently my Ebay revenue is up almost 363% from where it was before Thesis. I’m getting ready to roll out some more sites with Thesis so I’ll be interested to see if this trend continues, but I’m confident that they will. I think the bottom line is that you can do so much to customize Thesis that I can make these sites look much more attractive and engaging.
So if you haven’t picked up Thesis or Phpbay Pro then you might want to give them a try together. You might not have the same results that I did initially, but with the power of Thesis you’ll be able to use it in a variety of ways for all of your sites making it worth your while. I know that I’m looking forward to launching quite a few more sites based off Thesis and its continued future updates as well.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi, Clarke. That’s a really interesting result. Do you think it is simply a case that with the Thesis Theme the site looks more credible so people stay on the site longer?
Hi Patrick,
At this point that’s definitely what I think is going on with it. I’m getting ready to launch some other sites shortly so I can see if I continue to have success with PhpBay and Thesis together. I plan on doing some followup posts on here to detail my own progress.
congrats !! I am also considering thesis actually
btw, I can’t believe that this is the copyblogger theme !!!
Thanks Dinu, it’s definitely been a great investment for me so far. I’m probably going to do a custom redesign of this site with Thesis as well. I’ve already started putting some ideas together for it.
Now it’s just a matter of finding the time to do it.
Although this is very interesting…I would like to know more about what happened to your Obama yard sign.
Very good idea, I never heard of phppro untill you dropped a comment on my site. SO you have the dev license for that theme. What does it allow you to do with it other then build unlimited sites. Contact me about this ok, seeings how we both own dev lisnces on two hot themes….you get where I am going with this?
You sold me on Thesis! I woke up this morning convinced I need to buy the Thesis Theme for my BayRSS sites (EPN). I’m hoping the theme will increase traffic and sales. A 363% increase in revenue would make me very happy and put me right at just under $1,000 a month!
I’ll use your link to make the purchase!
Hi Shelly,
Thanks so much for stopping by and making a purchase through my link. I hope that you enjoy the same success with Thesis as well. How well do you like BayRSS? I’ve never used it as I’m a hardcore PhpBay user.
One thing that I must stress is a lot of testing with layouts on Thesis. I tried some different things before I found a combination that works. Also different niches often warrant different layouts.
It’s definitely a great theme though and hasn’t take me long to get my purchase price back out of it. One thing I highly recommend is to go through the forums, because there is a wealth of information there and everyone is extremely helpful.
Thanks again for stopping by and I’m glad you found my information about Thesis helpful.
Hey Drew,
How easy was it to convert your customised PHPbay site themes to thesis? Is there any ability for drop-down menus?
Cheers,
A.
Hi Anthony,
This is Clarke, not quite sure who Drew is? Anyway it didn’t take a whole lot to convert my sites over to Thesis. If you know some CSS it makes it much easier to build out a nicely customized version of Thesis.
As far as the dropdown menus go it doesn’t have anything built into it yet, but there has been talk of adding a dropdown menu option to Thesis down the road. You could integrate the following plugin to achieve your desired results though and I don’t think it would be that hard. http://pixopoint.com/suckerfish-wordpress-plugin/
Hey Clarke,
The decrease in bounce rate, as well as substantial increase in PhpBay revenue is quite stunning. Did you do any A/B testing with the layout of your theme on the site(s) that you deployed Thesis on, or did it work that well out of the box?
Also, I’ve heard of people getting an increase in organic search traffic courtesy of Thesis since it has several built-in SEO tricks as well as the fact that the page that it generates tends to be cleaner than a lot of the other themes out there. Have you seen an increase in search engine traffic as well?
I’m seriously considering purchasing it for my computer repair site and if what I hear about the effectiveness of its SEO is true then that’d be the clincher. Obviously, I’ll make a point to purchase it through your affiliate link.
One last question – assuming you have AdSense sites as well, did you see an increase in that revenue stream as well? I use AdSense primarily on my sites, although I’m going to look into this PhpBay plugin now that you’ve brought it to my attention.
Thanks for the post!
-Kevin Souter
Hey Kevin,
Initially when I setup Thesis as a test on some of my phpbay sites, I pretty much just used an out of the box layout. It seemed to perform great from the beginning.
I did also notice an increase in organic search traffic when I changed themes to Thesis so that’s definitely been nice. It’s nice to have these SEO features automatically built into the theme instead of having to upload plugins to accomplish them.
I’ve not used Adsense on any of my sites in about 3 years now. I mainly run different affiliate programs on my sites in addition to the Ebay Partner Network and I have seen increase in revenue from them.
Right now I’ve got about 10 sites running off Thesis and a couple of client sites as well and I really enjoy working with the theme. With each release of Thesis it continues to get better and the new beta version has built in support for drop down menus and so much else. I’d definitely recommend picking up the theme, the developer version was some of the best $164 that I’ve spent in a long time.
Hopefully I answered all of your questions, but if you have anymore just let me know.
Thanks,
Clarke