Headway theme is a great WordPress theme for the DIYer’s and the developer. If you’re looking to create a blog or a 1.0 site for your business. It’s a theme that allows you to create a site without having to code. You don’t need to know CSS or PHP or even a lot about WordPress. So fits really well with WordPress and the DIYer.
Headway has this awesome feature called a Visual Editor. It allows you to click on the area you would like to change some CSS properties of and change them very easily. Like I said, it’s great for the DIYer. There are a lot of other awesome features that Headway has but I won’t touch of them in this post. I want to touch on an issue that has been bothering me for the past few weeks.
There are people in the Headway community that do not understand CSS, PHP, or even how WordPress works. They people who started off as a DIYer to create their own site, but they’ve started taking it one step further. They are starting to charge clients to build sites on WordPress and Headway. These sites are all ordinary, cookie cutter sites that their clients could do themselves with the use of the Visual Editor.
Let’s take a moment so everyone understands what I just said. People that charge clients for sites designed with just the Visual Editor is wrong. They are NOT designers. They don’t understand basic web standards, how the site is going to look in various browsers, or how code works. What gets me is the fact that they charge almost just as much as real designers.
Where does the problem lie? Well it could start with the developers of Headway. Ultimately they are in the business of making money and so they are going to create a quality product that meets the need of their customers. But why do you want to display the same cookie cutter sites as quality examples of sites designed with the Headway theme? Is this because real designers haven’t used Headway to design sites? Is this because you aren’t going after the designers but you’re going after the DIY crowd?
Update: After thinking about this in greater detail I decided to rewrite the above part. We as in the Headway community should be highlighting what can be done with Headway and educating other Headway developers so that Headway sites are not cookie cutter sites. I would think as a Headway developer you would want to try new things with the theme. Clients are going to ask for things that the Visual Editor just can’t do and those developers are going to need to understand that it can still be achieved with CSS and PHP.
How can we fix it? There’s good news though. We can fix this. Instead of highlighting the cookie cutter sites, let’s highlight the great works that people have created. Let’s show the WordPress and Headway communities what can be created with Headway if you go above and beyond just using the Visual Editor.