Headway version 1.5 has been released and includes numerous improvements and additions including: new photo gallery option, drag and drop header, auto thumbnails, a completely new interface and more. Check all the new features here.
Headway is an extremely sophisticated, flexible and easy to use premium WordPress theme system which enables average WordPress users as well as developers / designers to create unique, great looking WordPress sites. The Headway theme system features a vast amount of options including an amazing visual layout editor that allows you to arrange elements on the fly using simple drag & drop to create anything from a standard blog, to landing pages, to membership sites, to e-commerce sites. The custom design editor allows you to customise just about every design element of the theme including the items and order of the navigation menu, colours, fonts, favicon and more. The configuration panel also allows you to edit everything behind the scenes including the most thorough SEO controls of any premium theme.
Site Configuration Panel
The Site Configuartion Panel allows you to control the blog’s header, posts, comments, and footer settings, plus site dimensions. Features include:
- Easy uploading of your own header image
- Turning on or off the display of elements such as your blog’s tagline or navigation links
- Switching between a fixed-width header vs. a fluid one that spans the width of the browser window
- Rearrange header elements by simply dragging them on the screen
- Finely control post meta options, such as the publication date, author name display, number of comments, and more
- Set the number of featured (full) posts for the blog’s main page compared to excerpts or just headlines
- Choose normal or small excerpts (full-page width vs. a smaller “box”) — or no excerpts at all
- Choose to display comments on pages or not
- Choose to show commenter Gravatars or not, enter a URL for a custom default (blank) Gravatar, and set the avatar display size in your comments
- Set fixed or fluid width footer
- Choose to show or hide various footer elements, such as copyright, go to top link, login link, and more
- Set site page dimensions and page margin
Navigation Panel
The Navigation Panel lets you control and fine-tune the navigation bar. Capabilities include:
- Show or hide subpages (also known as child pages) in your navigation bar
- Hide the Home link, in case you don’t need it because you’re using the blog header only as the home link
- Make any links in your navigation bar inactive so they don’t show (but the pages still exist)
- Drag any link in the navigation bar to any position you want, until you have the link order you desire
Leaf Panel
Headway’s Leaf Panel in the Visual Layout Editor gives you unprecedented control over the visual placement and dimensions of page content. Each leaf is a content box. You get to decide what goes into the box, where the box goes on the page, and how big the box is. You can add leafs, arrange them, resize them, delete them, and edit their settings. The kind of Leafs you can add to any page layout you want in Headway are:
- Content Leaf: displays posts according to settings you choose, such as including or excluding certain categories and the number of posts to be displayed
- Widget Ready Sidebar: add as many sidebars as you want in your layout—including the ability to have special “sideways sidebars” in the footer (which has, until Headway, always been a weak area in WordPress theme design)
- Text/HTML/PHP Leaf: put custom content of any kind you want into this leaf: regular text, XHTML, PHP, and JavaScript (such as for email opt-in forms, for example), it can take just about anything
- Featured Post Leaf: featured post leafs allow for animated transitions between a series of featured posts on your blog all within the same box
- RSS/Recent Posts Leaf: grab any RSS feed from any source (including your own, of course) and display a specific number of recent posts from it with this powerful Leaf
- Image Rotator Leaf: create an animated slideshow of images that gently fade one into another with this super-easy Leaf, and put it anywhere on the page you like
- About Leaf: create a highly detailed “about” box on your page with text, an image (you control the size of the picture), and a “more” link
- Photo Gallery Leaf: create amazing photo galleries for your blog with no extra WordPress plugins required—you have total control over every detail of the gallery, from thumbnail settings to slideshow animations
Visual Design Editor
The Visual Design Editor allows you to fine-tune the visual design by changing fonts, margins, and other aspects universally of the leafs, sidebar widgets, and other WordPress blog elements. Some of the properties you can control for selected elements include:
- Colors: you can use a visual color picker or enter a hexadecimal color code
- Font/Typeface: choose from a list of nearly universal web fonts (found on all Macs and Windows computers)
- Font Size: set the size of your text in pixels
- Line Height: set how much vertical space is in between each line
- Font Weight: set text as bold or normal
- Text Transform: set text as being normal, uppercase, or lowercase
- Font Variant: choose a “small caps” effect
- Letter Spacing: adjust the amount of gap between the letters of words to wider or more narrow
Configuration Panel
The Configuation Panel lets you get at settings that are “behind the scenes,” so you can change what you want.
- General Tab: Contains main blog settings for feeds, Google Analytics or other scripts, and more.
- Styling/Features: If you want to disable the Visual Design Editor, then you can change your style and font settings here, via drop-downs and checkboxes.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tab: Headway has the most thorough SEO features of any premium theme… all without any additional plugins. Here you can manage various kinds of page titles, description meta tags, nofollow settings, noindex settings, and more to boost your search engine rankings.
- Social Networking Tab: You can integrate your Twitter account into your blog without extra plugins to bog down your blog’s page load times. You can have your tweets automatically appear in a leaf on the blog, and automatically tweet your new blog posts to Twitter as soon as they’re published.
- Headway Permissions Tab: Have a multi-author blog or a team of designer/developers? Set their permissions for how much of Headway’s power they can access. You get to choose what type of user account (administrator, editor, etc.) has permission to see and use the various Headway tools, such as the Visual Design Editor or Headway Configuration. No other premium theme has these capabilities built in.
Support
Headway includes tutorials & documentation in plain English and a friendly and helpful support community
The power and flexibility of Headway Theme System can be a little difficult to comprehend with just words. To really appreciate the theme watch the video tour.
Price:
Personal: $87
Developer: $164
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