Headway WordPress Theme | Headway Review | WordPress Theme Advisor

Headway Theme for WordPress

Opinions from the Real World:

Don (Product Mgr) says: There’s a lot to like about Headway. I really dig the design options, and the way you can visually lay out a site. I also like the SEO title tag and meta description preview – it’s a nice touch.

eileen-lonergan

Eileen (Consultant) says: I am saying yes to Headway. There is undoubtedly a learning curve, especially with the sidebars and widgets. I would suggest Headway for a developer or a business owner who is committed to the learning process and has an eye for design. If you are a developer, once you learn the process it will be very easy for you to work with a variety of clients and build multiple sites and have them all appear completely customized.

I need to understand better why my videos won’t play on mobile devices, this could be problematic for certain types of sites, I see this as a stumbling block to using the Headway theme.

I also suggest that you don’t completely rely on Headway to take care of your total site SEO. Nothing is 100% perfect and a little human intervention can go a long way, take a moment to change the permalink default option, create custom page titles, tag your images, etc.

thomas-hasch Thomas (Developer) says: The Configuration and Options Panels are cool but way to technical. If you understand all the settings and options you might not even need a cookie cutter theme cause you obviously know your stuff my friend. All Thesis fanboys will be delighted to see “Hooks” in the Options Panel – even though Headway uses slightly different ones. Headway’s look is clean and simple but you could also say it is a bit boring.

Headway claims to be extremely robust in their seo option controls and heavy on the design options, which makes it sound like a perfect platform for building amazing WordPress websites.

Types of businesses that could find the Headway Theme appealing:

Real Estate
Wedding Planners
Designers
Photography
Travel
Blog
Speaker or Public Personality (the options for different columns on each page can accommodate your Twitter & Facebook Feeds)

Built in Features

SEO
Uploader custom header
Multiple column configuration
Set your own color scheme
One click color background change
One click font selector
Custom Options Panel
Moderated Help Forum
Video Tutorials
Mobile Theme
One Widget Ready Sidebar
Built in Social Widgets
One Click Headway Version Updator
About Page Template
404 Error Page Template
WordPress 3.0 Custom Menus

First Steps:

The default installation is very vanilla, which can either be a relief, or slightly overwhelming, depending upon your design interest and capabilities. The navigation bar is obvious and clean, the RSS feed is built in and there is a pre-installed search bar.

The site comes with two pre-built pages, an About page and a 404 Error page. This is interesting, as the 404 page is often overlooked, but a terrific opportunity to redirect your visitors back to the homepage of your site. Customizing it to the tone and look of your site lets visitors know they aren’t completely off track!

Configuration Panel

When I first installed the theme I was a blown away by the amount of options in the Headway Configuration Panel. I decided a logical approach would be to work my way through the seven tabs to see just how useful this would be toward building my site.

Cool Stuff:

You can enable a printer option, which allows your website to be more “printer” friendly.
Favicon Location – with a link to favicon.cc I love this!
Skins – there are optional layouts available: one which is free, the others range from $27-$75, this could be valuable if you don’t want to bother with the design options.
Feed URL – with a link to FeedBurner. The direct link is a great reminder to complete this step and it makes the process that much easier.
Version Checks – Headway will automatically display a bar at the top of the admin panel when there is an available update. This is super handy as the best way to keep your site safe is to keep it updated, both with WordPress and with the developer
SEO slug clean up – you can remove superfluous words (such as a, an, the) from titles, with one click of a radio box!

Footer scripts – nice box for code with a link to Google Analytics

Scratching my head:

Posts Meta – I am lost here, there are lots of options, with no directions and no clue how or why to change anything.
- Permalinks is the tool that forms a websites URL’s. What I really like to do is customize my permalinks
  - (a blog without default permalinks, will look like this http://www.rjwcollective.com/blog/?p=3099
  - a blog with permalinks http://www.expand2web.com/blog/small-businesses-review-wednesday-rwx/)
  - by going to the Permalinks link in Settings I can change the setting to /%postname%/ in the custom structure, this little modification modifies urls to be descriptive, which can give you an seo boost.
  - Given Headway’s claim at superior SEO should I be concerned?
SEO Section – you can easily add your meta content, home description and home keywords, but not your home title.
Header Scripts – they give you a nice box to input <head>, but no clues as to what that info could be – not great if you are just starting out; however if you understand that the header is where you verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools then this feature moves right up to Stuff I Like!

Visual Editor – Wow! There is a learning curve, that is for sure, but if you are a visual builder, or really want to customize, then you could become addicted to Headway!

For those just jumping in there is a Wizard which allows you to:
- choose the number of columns you want, (5 options),
- upload a header - when your header is uploaded the Headway design editor automatically scans the colors and generates a site color palette for you to utilize on other areas of the site if you so desire.
- color scheme – choose from suggested colors culled from your header, or customize colors from the color box selector (you can choose colors visually, enter a RGB code or HEX #)
- font selector for your titles and content area
- I added Headway’s video overview of their Quick Start Guide at the end of this post if you would like to see these steps in action.

In the design editor you can
- change background color or images (by page)
- modify the number of columns, and what appears in each sidebar
- have pages that don’t display your header, or modify elements of the header such as: removing the nav bar, search bar or subscribe link
- hide the Headway attribution
- change the site dimensions
- sky is pretty much the limit here, I would dare to say that you can do whatever you want!

Download the Headway WordPress Theme Now

SEO

Within the pages and posts of Headway, the seo options are super interactive, allowing you to customize page titles, and actually get a “visual” on how they will look as you enter the text into the title bar. The meta description is pulled from your “on page” content, yet you have complete control over editing that section. My assumption is that if you like this theme, you lean toward the visual – this seo option panel is really perfect for laying out exactly what the search engines will see and encouraging you to think about if it best represents your goal for that page/post.

Easy Hooks

This concept, in general, is not for those just getting started, and they don’t provide an explanation. I personally don’t understand Easy Hooks, but have built a bunch of sites without it, so don’t get hung up here.

Video

My Vimeo video’s won’t display on the iPad or iPhone, not happy about that

Widgets

Headway has one default sidebar. Through the visual editor you can certainly modify this, but out of the box it takes a bit of knowledge to understand the customizing and saving of leafs in order to build templates for your various pages.

There is a built in widget that I hadn’t seen before that I really like, Social Widget – it allows you to put in the url to your various feeds, Rss, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, StumbleUpon and FriendFeed, the output is very nice looking and it takes just a couple of minutes to complete!

Help / Support

There are help buttons and tutorials throughout the building process. Sometimes I don’t love reading, I just click away and hope for the best, but if you have the personality type that allows you to read the instructions and carry them out, you most likely will not have to leave the visual editor panel when designing.

If you need to take your question to the next level, there is a very robust Forum. It seems well organized with lots of activity.
Getting in touch with Headway Themes – I spent about 5 minutes and couldn’t figure out where to post my question and it doesn’t really seem as though the developers want you contacting them with things such as “how do I drag and drop”. Out of fairness to them, there really is so much built in help you should be able to take yourself pretty far and deep into the process before you need the folks at Headway Headquarters.

Eileen’s Opinion

If you are still mulling your decision, I suggest you watch their Quick Start Video.

When shopping for themes Eileen Lonergan looks for specific features: