The Thesis theme for WordPress truly is a great theme for a business website, for the following reasons and more:
- It installs “out of the box” with a clean, professional look
- Wide range of configuration options
- Easily customizable through custom CSS and with a large support community
- Add content anywhere with the Thesis open hook system, which plays very well with OpenHook plugin.
Thesis does, however, cost $87, and so several people have attempted to create a theme similar to Thesis (emulate the Thesis look-and-feel). The limitation of these is, of course, the lack of customizability — Thesis is much more than “just a pretty face”, there is a tremendous amount of thinking that has gone “under the hood” as well for changing the layout to your needs. For more on themes vs. theme frameworks, see Choosing a good WordPress theme for your business or corporate website
Short of buying the real thing, however, you now have a better solution. There is another excellent theme framework that offers an overlapping (and in some ways superior) feature set called Atahualpa. What’s more, it’s free, and it can be downloaded directly through your WordPress site’s dashboard. Only problem is, the default styling of Atahualpa is a bit clunky.
No problem — CSS to the rescue. After procrastinating on this for some weeks I finally “bit the bullet” and styled Atahualpa to a Thesis look-alike. Here is the result:
(Click the image for the demo site)
Download instructions
Most free content on WordPress Academy requires a free registration, but due to confusion about the registration process I have made it as simple as possible to use this theme. Just signup your email below and we’ll send you the download link and instructions.
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