I’ve used a number of dif­ferent blog­ging sys­tems over the years going back to Blogger, WordPress​.com, self-hosted WordPress and Squarespace. Now that I’ve set­tled in at new hosting, and am run­ning a self-hosted WordPress site again, I set out in search of the “right” theme for this blog. The short ver­sion is that I’m using Headway and you can go a long way before finding any­thing any better. Depending on your needs, maybe you can’t.

Headway is not so much a theme as it is a theme devel­op­ment plat­form. Out of the box it gives you a pretty stan­dard looking blog that is cer­tainly func­tional enough, if not very inspiring. The magic hap­pens when you start to put your own look to it and find how very much you can do without writing a line of CSS, HTML or PHP code. And if those let­ters don’t mean any­thing to you, you may espe­cially want to take a look at Headway.

There are so many themes avail­able for WordPress that it would be hard to put a number on the total. And most of them are free. Not that that’s bad, in fact that’s pretty good, but if you’re looking for some­thing that will be around for a while and be sup­ported while it is, you know that you get what you pay for. Literally. For some folks, there’s a free theme out there that suits their needs just right – no need to do much to cus­tomize it, just use it as it comes.

But if you want your blog, or web­site, to have a par­tic­ular look there will need to be some cus­tomiza­tion done of most any theme. And some themes are more cus­tomiz­able than others. Maybe there are a few color choices, the ability to upload your own header, or even change the base font. But when its time to really get the job done, you are out of the realm of the free themes and you’re looking for a pre­mium theme with a wide range of fea­tures. Take a good look at Headway.

The fea­ture list for Headway runs long; to get more of the pic­ture, I’d sug­gest checking out their web­site. Here I want to high­light a few of the things that really drew me to Headway. The first, and most impor­tant, is the almost unbe­liev­able Visual Editor. If you’ve ever tried Squarespace, you have a sense for what the Visual Editor is.

Unlike any other theme editor for WordPress, Headway’s Visual Editor allows you to see your site as it will be seen by others as you build it. And better than that, you can make changes simply by clicking on the object to change and selecting from the options on the con­trol panel.

Pages in Headway are con­structed from leafs (like the leafs of a table, not the leaves of a tree). A range of stan­dard leafs comes with Headway, such as text, con­tent (for blog posts and the like), widget ready sidebar, and HTML/PHP (for the code guys). Other leafs can be pur­chased (there are free ones, too) and added. Once you add a leaf to your layout, you can drag it to the place on the page you want it.

The width of columns and leafs can be adjusted by clicking on the one you want and drag­ging a slider in the con­trol panel. Many options are offered for the footer, header and columns. Most of the dif­ferent text ele­ments on the page can be clicked on and then styled as you’d like. There is a tremen­dous range of options that give you the ability to create very dif­ferent and unique pages all with Macintosh drag and drop, point and click, and pick from the menu ease.

Your options don’t stop with the Visual Editor. In more tra­di­tional WordPress fashion there are many choices to be made in the dash­board. It is there you’ll find the ability to con­figure the meta data around your post titles (such as author, date, cat­e­gory, etc.), set the wide range of search opti­miza­tion (SEO) options and create backups of your work.

There’s a lot of power avail­able to users with a little under­standing of WordPress and a vision of what they’d like their web­site to look like. And it doesn’t stop there. Developers with a knowl­edge of web coding can just go to town with the numerous hooks (use them with PHP and HTML) that pro­vide access to adding ele­ments to the design. If the Visual Editor doesn’t offer the ability to change the style of an item you need to change, you can use the Live CSS. Make changes to the CSS of your site and see the effects in real time within the Visual Editor – you have to see that to believe it!

And there’s more to Headway than simply building and cus­tomizing your own web­site. Developers can use Headway to create any number of dif­ferent sites for their cus­tomers; each one looking very dif­ferent from the rest. For that you’ll need to step up from the Personal to the Developer package. The Personal edi­tion is $87 and the Developer edi­tion is $164 with upgrades from Personal to Developer avail­able for the dif­fer­ence in price.

Let me not end without acknowl­edging that Headway is not the only game in town for devel­oping sophis­ti­cated web­sites in WordPress. Headway’s pri­mary com­pe­ti­tion comes from the very well respected Thesis theme – another theme devel­op­ment plat­form. A large and pro­fes­sional com­mu­nity has grown up around Thesis and for good reason. For those with a smaller budget, I should men­tion the very capable, but little known, Suffusion from Aquiod Themes. I used that for this blog right before I switched to SquareSpace.

If you are looking for a tool to improve a web­site you already have, or need to find some­thing to get started with, I’d rec­om­mend taking a look at Headway and Thesis, at least. They both cost the same and both offer 30-day money back guar­an­tees. I know I won’t be wanting my money back for Headway.