I did some research into paid WordPress template frameworks and finally decided to purchase the Headway Themes template recently.

The templates I looked at for WordPress were: Headway Themes, Thesis and Genesis. Of course there are others, but these are the three WordPress premium themes I zeroed my choice down to.

Headway Themes won out because of its’ excellent visual editor feature, which let’s you see the changes as you choose them instead of having to save the options then having to refresh your blog. There are a gazillion customization options and I really wanted to see what I could get done with it.

They offer two choices, Headway Personal for $87, which allows you to use the template on two sites or Headway Developer for $164, which allows unlimited use of the template. Either option gives you unlimited upgrades for life and support for whichever option you choose. I did the Headway personal option and found a 10% online discount coupon. I still have the option to upgrade to the Developer option for $77.

It looks like I just missed the 30% off discount coupons floating around in late December for Headway, oh well.

This site, which used to use the free Curious WordPress template, which I really liked, was my first test of Headway. I just wanted to see what I could do in a few hours of messing around with it and what you see is the result. The image below shows the before and after.

I went in and quickly created a custom header, all the nav colors and threw in what they call an image rotator leaf, which is the rotating slide show near the top. For the image rotator leaf all you do is upload some images and point to the URL of each image. You can tell it how long to display each and which transition you will use. It was super easy to create as long as you made each image the same size it worked like a charm.

These leafs, which I really think of as Divs, can easily be moved all over the layout by just dragging and dropping. That’s very cool.

I have not finished with customization of AloneOnTheWeb yet. I want to see what I can make the theme do. I am planning on using the second license I purchased for a freelance website I am in the early stages of redesigning for a freelance client. The site will have lots of photography and video so it should be a real good test of the capabilities of the Headway Themes template.

Has anyone else used the Headway Themes template for WordPress recently and have any comments?