Premium Themes Use or Not?

[copykatrecipes]

I am just curious if any of you use the premium themes such as Genesis or Thesis, if so why did you move to those themes?  Also what is the real benefit to one of those themes?  I know both claim to help with SEO, but I can't really understand exactly how other than the code may be more efficient.

[Theo-NL]

A couple months ago I've written a blog post about this. The blog was targeted at Joomla templates rather than Wordpress themes, but pretty much all the arguments apply to both of them, so this might be an interesting read for you:

http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/21/18-benefits-of-professional-joomla-templates/

[copykatrecipes]

Thanks for the info about joomla  My experience with Joomla was the most horrific experience I had with websites in my last 15 years.  Continual hacking despite good efforts to keep them out, is why I went to wordpress.  For me, joomla was great in concept, but since I am not an IT expert it did not work well for me.

Thanks for the link!

[LabadieAuto]

I have used Genesis themes and Elegant themes with great success on a lot of websites.  The use of the theme of for design, ease of use and saving time.  SEO is really a function of how much time you have.  Naturally filling in the title, description and keywords manually is the best but most time consuming way to enter content no matter what platform you use.

If you want a plug-in that is fairly simple to setup and does a great job I recommend the SEO by Yoast plugin.  I have used a lot over the years and this has fairly easy to setup and works great.

A few of my other plugin recommendations can be found on my Genesis theme site http://defoenet.com/2011/01/favorite-wordpress-plug-ins/

[KeriMorgret]

There are many sites that use those premium themes. I use Thesis myself, in part because it had features that WP itself didn't (easy way to adjust drop-down nav menus for one). I've also used Genesis with one of their templates. If you're in a specific niche, buying a theme can reduce the amount of time you spend customizing the site because others have already added in the features you need.

Michael Gray (graywolf) and Rae Hoffman-Dolan (sugarrae) both use Thesis and have detailed reviews and tutorials on their sites. Copyblogger runs his site on Genesis, and I believe he has detailed reviews there as well.