May 8 / Richard Knop

Free alternative to Thesis for WordPress

I’m sure many of you WordPress users and developers have heard about the Thesis. For those of you who haven’t heard about it, it’s a flexible WordPress theme framework with an emphasis on SEO, accessibility and usability. Sounds great, doesn’t it? There’s a small catch in it though – it’s not free.

There are two type of licenses:

  1. Personal license for use on a single site (and a local development server) with a compulsory link in the footer. Costs $87.
  2. Developer license for use on any number of websites you own (a $40 fee to deploy the Thesis on a client website) without the link in the footer. Costs $164.

Both options include lifetime updates, access to support forums and some other useful stuff.

It is certainly a great framework with the SEO being its strongest selling point but not everyone can afford (or want to) buy it. Personally, I think the Thesis is a great anf flexible solution and if you are serious about your blog/website you should at least think about pursaching.

On the other hand, it doesn’t make much sense to buy it if you are just a free time blogger and are not looking to make money with your blog/website it’s (in my humble opinion) not worth it because there is a free solution.

Let me present to you the Vigilance – a free Thesis alternative. The Vigilance theme is not as great as the Thesis but when compared with other free themes it’s definately up to par. Features:

Vigilance

  • SEO friendly: mainly dynamic h1 tags (one of the two most important tags on a page for search engines)
  • dynamic top banner image and a sidebar image box
  • higly customizable sidebar
  • page layot options
  • neatly looking archives

There is a paid PRO membership for $39.95 which includes priority updates, access to support forums, special premium add-ons and more which sounds pretty good (I might buy it in the future if I decide to stay with the Vigilance). But the theme is free.

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