How much faith would you put into a recommendation for a product that the reviewer hadn’t actually tried? I think I know the answer, at first glance anyway!

I came across a product tonight that I was relieved to find and I wanted to share it with you:

So let’s make this review even stranger:

[Disclaimer:  The above image links to the DIY Themes website via an affiliate ID meaning that if you go to the site and purchase the theme I will make a little bit of money.]

Yep, I am actually advertising to you about a product that I haven’t tried!

I feel okay about doing this because I found this product on Chris Brogan’s site and figure that I can trust the co-author of Trust Economies, and author of some of the greatest content on the web!  (If you are not familiar with Chris make sure you read “You’re Doing It Wrong“, “The Righteous Web” and the “Social Media Decision Tree“).

I went to Chris’s site because he is great at what he does and I figured I can learn a lot from him.

While there is a lot that I could say about Chris’s site . . . I am here to talk about Thesis and its ‘behind the scene’ features and ‘futureproof customization system’.  This is a premium theme.

“Thesis boasts the strongest SEO of any theme on the market today . . .”

There are thousands of different marketers who will happily sell you the “Learn the Secrets of SEO & Have A Million Clicks on Your Website in Less Than 3 Minutes” ebook.

If you like spending all of your ‘blogging’ time searching for indexed algorithms in your XML sitemaps, worrying about spiders crawling over your robots.txt or have trouble spamdexing because you cannot decided what hat you are wearing . . . then you are obviously really passionate about SEO!

I am glad someone is passionate about it.  I read the ebook.  It sucked.  You are better off donating your heavily discounted, today only member special price of $20 to me.  I won’t send you any bonus gifts to the value of $35,000.

“Not a coder? Not a problem. The Thesis option panels allow you to command your site with ease, while Thesis does all of the heavy lifting behind the scenes.”

My coding ability = I have been to this page more than once.

“The difference is in the details. You may not know it, but typography and visual clarity are two of the most important aspects of your site. Properly setting type on the web is an exercise in mathematical precision, and this is not an area where you want to compromise. After all, typography is the primary vehicle for the most important thing on your site—your content!”

This is an important point.

Put simply, if the text is hard to read . . . people won’t want to read it.

“What about customizations and design changes? Thesis contains a futureproof customization system that allows you to produce unique designs, all while keeping your changes isolated to just two key files!”

This is major.  You can test different layouts, fonts, images etc. easily.  To give you a bit of an idea of some of the ways others have customized Thesis, have a look at this video appreciation of the Thesis Gallery Showcase.

[Music:  music by spaze craft one, it's use donated to matthewbibby.com]

“In addition to our in-house support staff, there are also tons of amazingly talented users who help newbies and veterans alike in our forums. On top of that, we’re ratcheting up the support with the addition of video tutorials, so now you’ll be able to do more with Thesis than ever before!”

In-house support staff, an active and supportive community of users, video tutorial and everything else mentioned in this post . . . well worth the $87 in my opinion.

If you agree, please click on the below image to go to the Thesis site:

Oh, and before I forget, here is Chris Brogan’s review of Thesis.  Have a read and have a look at how he has customized the design.

What do you think about my strange review?

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Tags: Chris Brogan, Search engine optimization, Theme, Typography, vimeo, Wordpress

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Business, General Ramblings, Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.