Theme frameworks can be used to turn your WordPress site into just about anything you want it to become from a news site to an online store. There are many different types of themes out there, but we’re going to stick to five of the most popular types of theme frameworks. Now let’s take a look at how these themes can change the overall appearance and functionality of your site.

Here are 5 best theme frameworks for wordpress that you can try on your website

1.Thesis

Thesis has an easy point-and-click control over all the elements of design. It has 5 control panels to help you customize different elements of your website.

Site Options Panel

The site options panel contains some broad-reaching options that effect every page on your site. Things like title tags robots meta tags can be set on a site-wide level making it easy to get your site to an SEO friendly point with a minimal amount of effort. Thesis also offers some robust URL structure options to help you make your site even more SEO friendly. You’ll also find a variety of options for managing your RSS feed and the ability to manage additional scripts and software on the site options panel. If you need to implement stat tracking software on your site, it can be done easily from within this panel.

Design Options Panel

In this panel you’ll be able to set everything from the number of columns your site has to the background color, to whether or not comments will appear on your site. In short, if there’s a visual feature you want to change, this is the place to do it.

Custom File Editor Panel

Thesis uses hooks to help you customize your site in great detail. Hooks are used to break your site down into specific parts and sections, and by using them effectively you can easily insert sections of code into your site, and have them appear exactly where you want them. The custom file editor panel gives you direct access to the code that makes up the various parts of your site, and allows you to make changes as you see fit without having to download and edit the files using an FTP program.

Manage Options Panel

If you plan to run multiple sites using Thesis, the manage options panel will quickly become your best friend. This panel makes it easy to export or import all of your various options and settings. You can also use this panel to restore the default options if you should find yourself in a situation where the changes you’ve made have broken your site.

SEO and Beyond

Thesis offers up a bunch of different options across all of the various options panels to help you make your site more SEO friendly. You can adjust everything from your link structure to your title structure to which pages are noindexed.

2.Headway Themes

Headway Themes offer some simple tools to help you design your WordPress site the way you’d like. Where other themes have you filling in values for various design elements or hard coding those elements yourself, Headway Themes have a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Visual Editor

The visual editor shows a list of options on the left hand panel, and it shows your site in the right hand panel. You can drag and drop the various elements of your site right there in the visual editor. You can even drag the borders of each individual element of the site to resize them. You can even move items around within an element of the site. For example, if you want to move a rotating ad from the middle of the sidebar to the top, you just have to click on it and drag it to the top.

Veteran web designers will probably be able to get more functionality out of a WordPress site by editing the code themselves, but if you’re not comfortable with PHP, you can create an attractive, unique WordPress site using nothing but the visual editor. If you do happen to know some PHP, you can use the visual editor to insert code into your site wherever you’d like it to go making it a surprisingly robust website editor.

The visual editor also lets you change things like the font, capitalization rules, line height, letter spacing, and text alignment. Without using a single line of code, you can make your WordPress site look exactly as you want it to, and the whole process won’t take you very long using the visual editor.

3.Studio Press

Studio Press is different from Thesis in two important ways: turnkey designs and unlimited everything.

Unlimited Everything

When you buy a license for Thesis you’ll have to choose whether you plan to use it for one website, or for multiple sites. When you buy a license for Genesis from Studio Press, you get unlimited sites, unlimited support, and unlimited updates for one standard price. If you plan to launch multiple websites, buying Studio Press makes sense as you can use it for each one of your website without paying for additional licenses.

Turnkey Designs

Out of the box, Studio Press gives you 43 good looking turnkey designs to use with the Genesis framework. When you’re setting up your site, you can choose one of these designs to get your site up and running quickly without a lot of hassle. Once you’ve picked the turnkey design that’s right for you, you can make adjustments to it in order to make it your own.

Security

In an effort to plug security holes, Studio Press hired on a security expert from the WordPress team to help keep their themes and the Genesis framework up to date when it comes to security. It’s not a guarantee that no one will ever hack your blog with Studio Press installed, but it does show that they take security seriously, and that’s worth taking notice of.

4.Elegant Themes

Some people don’t walk into creating a website with a clear picture of what type of site they want in mind. That’s where companies like Elegant Themes come in. Elegant Themes offers up a wide variety of extremely well designed themes designed with a wide variety of purposes in mind.

Elegant Themes offers up a lot of themes that would work well for just about any type of site as well as some themes that are designed to fit specific purposes. They offer themes suited to everything from real estate to ecommerce, and you get access to all of them for one price instead of having to buy one at a time.

Customization

Just because these themes are well designed to start with that doesn’t mean you can’t tweak them to suit your needs. Once you have a theme installed, you can use their built in ePanel to change a wide variety of things including the color scheme, page layout, the number of pages displayed on the home page or in search results, and which categories are included or excluded from the home page.

Shortcode

Shortcode can help you manage your content by letting you implement things like tabbed content, or content that can be toggled on or off at the press of a button. That way the reader will have an easy time consuming all of the information you have to offer.

If you’re worried about who can view your content, you can set up password protected content within Elegant Themes. That way, only authorized users can view specific pieces of content on your site.

You can also use the shortcode found in Elegant Themes to make your site more attractive by adding things like image sliders, custom buttons, and customized lists. As you add these little design elements to your site, you’ll begin to make it your own without even realizing it.

Conclusion

Starting a website can be extremely challenging. Each day thousands of new websites go live, and some sites never get a single visitor. No matter what topic your site covers, you’re not the only one covering it, and that means you have to take as many measures as you possibly can to make your website both attractive and SEO friendly.

WordPress helps you do both of those things without the need for a lot of coding knowledge. That means a lot of people can use it to get a site up and running, so even among WordPress sites, you’ll still have to go to some effort to make yours stand out. By using theme frameworks to your advantage you can do just that.