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Looking for the Perfect WordPress Theme?

Few things can present a more important task than finding the perfect WordPress theme for your website. Your theme touches seemingly everything, from the eyes of your users to the plugins you have installed. Your entire site is built around and on top of it… but selecting the right one can be a major challenge.

There’s a forest of themes out there to choose from, and many of them are garbage.

That’s strong statement, but it’s an unfortunate reality. We work with users on a daily basis who struggle with issues related directly to their theme, and that’s only where theme issues and WordPress forms intersect for us.

There's a forest of themes out there to choose from, and many of them are garbage.

Chances are that if you’re on the market for a new theme, you’ve hit some of these pain points. Probably others, as well:

  • Parts of your website do not scale properly on mobile devices
  • Different plugins break or don’t play nice with your theme in place
  • Website presentation appears broken in certain browsers
  • Website slows way down with the theme active
  • Aesthetic options and features are limited or difficult to use
  • Translation or multilingual support is incomplete or broken
  • WordPress updates have become a massive maintenance headache
  • Support is intermittent or nonexistent

Choosing the right WordPress theme is a critical decision for a smoothly operating site

If you’ve never run up against any of the pain points listed above, you’ve chosen well.

If you have, then you can save time, money, and mountains of frustration by reconsidering your choice. A theme that’s designed professionally from the ground up, not just in the pretty face that it displays to users but in the code that it depends on, can make all the difference in your WordPress experience.

We can’t point you at the one theme that’s going to be perfect for you. We can point you at a family of themes that are going to each and every one provide you with as near to flawless an experience as it get, though.

The Genesis Framework by StudioPress is as close to the perfect WordPress theme experience as you’re going to find.

We very highly recommend you take a look into the Genesis Framework themes by StudioPress. What is Genesis? A professionally designed and virtually future-proof, affordable, fully documented, fully supported theme framework for WordPress. Genesis is how you stop spending time and money on basic WordPress maintenance that you shouldn’t have had to have been doing in the first place.

What is the Genesis Framework?

Theme frameworks (parent themes) are a little different than the visual elements most people think of when they think about a WordPress theme. That can be a bit confusing, so here’s the skinny on the difference.

You can think of a framework or parent theme as the foundation and frame of a house. It’s the bits and pieces behind your drywall, under the floors, wiring, plumbing, etc. It’s all the critical things that have to be done right in any home. They aren’t the most visible aspects, but they’re foundational (haha, punny :p ) for a well working WordPress theme.

The visual part of the theme itself, technically called the child theme and the part we’re all familiar with, is the visual stuff we attach to the frame. You can pretty much design any child theme you want to finish out your home’s frame. It’s super important to you that your theme be aesthetically pleasing because it’s the user facing part of your site, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Many a WordPress theme looks great but has a less than optimal framework that it’s built on. That’s precisely why so many themes you run into are garbage. A poorly designed framework is going to cause a lot of pain even with the most beautiful skin wrapped around it.

The Genesis framework is an expertly designed foundation and frame that many gorgeous WordPress themes have been built around.

What do themes built on the Genesis framework offer?

The Genesis framework has been designed to offer the most structurally solid, performance optimized foundation for your website that is capable of evolving right alongside WordPress.

What's the closest thing to the perfect #WordPress theme experience you're going to find? Come and see!

 – Search Engine Optimized

You’ve put a ton of work into your site, and you want it to be seen. The Genesis framework is highly optimized for SEO so that your site is as visible on the web as is possible. SEO is an evolving game, and regular updates to the Genesis framework keep you ahead of the game.

 – Future-proof Design

WordPress hasn’t stopped changing since its inception, and it won’t stop anytime soon. Your theme has to evolve with it or there will be issues galore. Built on HTML5, the most modern code standard available, the Genesis framework means your site will be compatible with WordPress updates well into the future.

 – State-of-the-Art Security

Website security is a vital issue for any organization, and your theme’s code is on the front lines. StudioPress brought in security expert and WordPress core developer Mark Jaquith to audit the Genesis codebase and ensure that the framework follows WordPress security best practises to the letter.

 – Feature Rich Customization without Sacrificing Performance

No matter what a theme looks like “out-of-the-box”, you’re going to want to tailor it to you. The Genesis framework is built to allow high levels of customization for any theme built on it. Often “feature rich” also means long page load times. Genesis is the exception, its streamlined design making it incredibly lightweight and fast!

 – Lifetime Professional Support and Updates

Support and updating is essential with any theme, and it’s disheartening to see how many WordPress themes don’t offer this basic necessity. Genesis Framework themes by StudioPress come with lifetime support and updated to keep your site running into the future without falter.

Where can I find themes built on the Genesis framework?

StudioPress is the maker of Genesis, and the go-to for finding the WordPress theme that’s perfect for you. Each StudioPress theme you’ll find is built on the Genesis framework. There’s dozens of child themes to choose from and over 200,000 active WordPress installations running off of them. They have a convenient section on their website devoted to educating and getting started.

If you’re looking to develop your own child theme, you can find the Genesis framework itself there as well. It includes detailed tutorials, support, and more.

StudioPress + Ninja Forms

As mentioned above, we help diagnose issues on a daily basis for our users that are a direct result of running a less than stellar theme. Usually the reason they find their way into our support queue is a problem with form display resulting from a theme. The theme improperly applying styling or mishandling scaling for mobile devices is the usual culprit. While it looks like it’s the form that’s broken, it’s actually the theme telling it to do weird things. We go into a bit more detail on that in the article My Form Looks Funny, Help!

If you dig into that article a bit, you’ll see we feature StudioPress themes as the standard for how a well designed theme handles form display. In fact, StudioPress uses Ninja Forms in their demos to model how their child themes handle WordPress forms! Suffice it to say, you won’t have any issues with form display if your a Ninja Forms user on a StudioPress child theme 🙂

Good luck finding the perfect WordPress theme for your site! Feel free to ask questions if you have them below, and we’d love to know what StudioPress theme you’re using too!