Unintended Thesis Benefit: Education

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I’ve stated before that I am a huge Thesis WordPress Theme fan. In fact, I only use Thesis on all of the new blogs that I start. Everyone talks about the obvious benefits of using Thesis like how customizable it is and the search engine optimization built into it. But I have found another huge benefit to using Thesis–I’m actually learning!

By education, I’m a lawyer. That’s about as far from coding as you can get. In the law, everything is about making an argument, playing devil’s advocate, and seeing both sides to an issue. It’s all gray. Coding is black and white. One comma means the difference between your site showing up or being a big blank error message. It’s right or it’s wrong. With no formal education in coding, I have to learn as I go.

Using Thesis, I am able to actually learn things like “hooks” and “css.” There are so many blog posts out there about customizing your Thesis installs that you can actually start to learn the coding just from reading them. In addition, the Thesis forum is so robust that you can read thread after thread about how different parts of the code works. When I reached the point that the blog posts and forum started making sense to me, I knew that I was learning something about the actual coding.

I won’t proclaim to be an expert, but through using Thesis and all of the accompanying official and unofficial documentation, I am understanding how to edit headers and footers, modify css, and even move columns. It’s taking me from being a simple blogger with a basic theme to being able to make enough changes to my sites (and understand how those changes are being made) that I feel like the sites are really mine.  I have a long way to go, but I’m learning more each week. What has your experience with Thesis been like? Do you stick to the basic layout, modify it a little, or go all out to make it your own?