Getting to grips with Headway is a curious experience. Its a little like trying to run a race with someone holding onto the back of your shirt and then suddenly they let go. At first, it seems quite daunting especially with the comprehensive user interface. Install the theme and you are immediately presented with the option to dive into the Visual Editor. Do that, and you find yourself staring at a blank canvas that looks nothing like WordPress, a little unsure of what to do next. Once you start, though, the approach starts dropping into place and you quickly find yourself creating layouts, especially if you use Headway’s inheritance and work with WordPress’ default behavior. The Visual Editor and Design interfaces are excellent, the “drawing” of a layout is intuitive and the resizing and moving of blocks is virtually flawless. At times I forgot that I was working in a browser. I would have liked more feedback, especially when completing the configuration of a block. With no “save” button, other than the global button in the top menu, I was initially not sure if my new settings would stick or not. You will find yourself constantly going back into the WordPress admin interface to manage menus and widgets, so you’ll likely need three browser windows: WordPress admin, Headway and the “live” site. This is especially the case for widgets with the range of included blocks being relatively small. Headway also adds quite an array of SEO features to pages and posts. The value will depend on whether you have already invested time and effort in one of the many existing SEO plugins. If you haven’t then this will bring immediate improvement to your site. Flexibility is certainly Headway’s major strength. There are no constraints on the layout and the grid-based approach, as opposed to rows and columns, combined with automatic height adjustment means that any layout is a possibility. Being child theme compatible is a major bonus and, in fact, you’d almost certainly want to develop on a child theme. Given the potential speed of development, developing child themes targeted at particular platforms (and using a theme switcher) is a distinct possibility. Headway will let you design the layout for almost any site you can imagine. And with the layout process still using a base template, the results are pretty good even without any additional styling. #HeadwayThemes
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 22:46:45 +0000
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