Like most entrepreneurs, I’m a DIY dude. 
That goes for just about everything in my life, including freaky things like:
- Home birth of our son
- Baking our own bread
- Making our own beer
- Ripping out the entire dashboard of our ’86 Volvo to fix the ventilation system
Although some things I leave to the experts, like:
- Trauma surgery
- Flying passenger jets
- All things electrical
- CSS/PHP/XHTML/LMNOP/XYZ/BYOB
That last one is tricky, because I built sparkyfirepants.com with my own two hands, with the exception of the landing page. Thankfully I wised up and hired a CSS pro to handle that nightmare for me. I like figuring stuff out, but I also like to sleep and not grind my teeth (more than usual, that is).
Mission accomplished, I turned back to my other site, Digital Illustration School.
Redesigning for Content and Community
As I sketched out ideas for what I wanted to do with my illustration tutorial site, I knew that I needed it to be more dynamic. My free content paired with the more in-depth lessons for purchase had to play nice with each other. That meant a blog integration of some kind, but how to do it?
I could have someone build another theme for me, but frankly I didn’t have the budget for it.
I could start learning CSS, but as we’ve seen I am not that crazy. I’m a graphics guy. Which may be just a different brand of crazy.
So I finally decided on WordPress as the platform to build the new site. I just needed to find the right theme. After searching, searching some more, and… searching, I was back to square one. Sort of. I just couldn’t find a theme that had the customization I wanted. I’d heard good things about Thesis but since all the “How this works” stuff is in video format, I just couldn’t sit through it all to find out if it was the right option for me (video was stuttering with my slow connection). I prefer to read about features before I buy, so… I skipped it.
Is that lame? Maybe, but I’m being frank here. I simply never checked out Thesis and that’s why.
Enter Headway
Okay, so I knew about Headway before I started. I’ve known Grant Griffiths for a couple years and was well aware that Headway was his baby. I admit, I looked around a while and exhausted my options before I came back around to Headway.
But-but-but…the thing that kept bubbling to the surface every time I browsed a free theme was this little man in my head who kept saying yeah, but Headway has drag-and-drop.
Okay. Headway.
I dropped some cash into a personal option license. note: I’ve since become an affiliate of Headway because it simply rocks. There are very few products I push like this. I’m super picky.
How it all Worked Out
I have enough experience installing WordPress on my own domain that installing the theme wasn’t going to be a problem. Still, there are plenty of instructions on the Headway Themes site that would have guided me through that process.
Now, I’ve never built a site on my local drive. In this case it was a really wise thing to do, especially since I needed to keep my existing site up while I figured out what the hell I was creating. More on this later.
Creating a site using Headway was pretty routine as far as setting up new pages and configuring posts. Headway’s real power is in the Visual Editor. It took a few minutes to get myself oriented, but very quickly I understood that this was freedom.
My single favorite feature of the Visual Editor is the Leafs. Resize, drag into position, save, and preview. It’s nothing short of awesome. Being able to quickly set up a page configuration and tweaking content along the way was exactly what I needed to be spending my time on – not figuring out CSS.
I could create a page and apply the leaf configuration to other layouts. That saved me a ton of hours and carpal tunnel issues.
Configuring navigation is easy, too. I created some hierarchies I wanted in my original site version that I just couldn’t implement last year. In fact, using Headway I was able to quickly test ideas in minutes, so I tried new things that previously would have had me tied up for days.
I spent a lot more time on my content (copy and graphics) than I did on building the site. It really was that easy.
There is excellent built-in SEO, but I have yet to mess with the manual settings.
If you look through the gallery on the Headway Themes web site, you’ll notice there are prettier sites than the one I just created. There’s much more possible with Headway than I was able to dive into on this first go-round. But you can check out my work here:
Sparky Firepants Digital Illustration School
Niggle Niggle
Back to developing on my local machine. Still a wise choice (I used MAMP on a Macbook) and building the site was easy. However, when I transferred everything over to my web server, the site was completely messed up. To put it mildly.
It looked like I had done everything according to all the instruction I’d had previously. I swear.
Admittedly, I am a stubborn jackass and tech support’s worst nightmare. I know just enough to get myself into trouble. It was no different when I contacted Headway support. Clay Griffiths (creator of Headway) handled my case and he probably has the bruises to prove it.
My frustration and subsequent niggle was that I didn’t want to mess with any code or MySQL to get my site up. I bought the theme with total ease in mind, so this stumbling block didn’t sit well after the initial joy of creating.
As it turns out, a niggle turned out to be another damn nice thing to say about Headway. As frustrating as the issue was, Clay walked me through the process of tweaking the code in MySQL to make everything work correctly on the web.
They’re also working on a fix for this issue in the next version which should be out soon.
The Final Word
Because I am a lunatic who has projects coming out my arse, I’m going to be building several new sites this year. Some of them are going to require hiring a web designer to make them what I need them to be (and because I can’t do it all even if my coffee cup says otherwise).
The ones where I need to get a simple site up with blog integration, I’m defaulting to Headway. In fact, I’ll probably upgrade to a developer license to accomplish all that I need to do.
Does Headway, or any theme for that matter, take the place of a great web designer? No way. Building a web site is much more than configuring leafs in a WordPress theme. But if you know you’re using WordPress, you’ve got a clear idea of what you need to do with your site, and you’re looking for a theme to do it for you, Headway is amazing.
Update April 2010: Since I wrote this post, I have given this site (sparkyfirepants.com) a complete overhaul. I upgraded to Headway 1.6 and now have a developer license. I’ve been able to create the site I wanted using WordPress and the Headway Theme. It wasn’t easy. There was a learning curve where I wanted to do things with this site I’ve never done before. If you’re ready to put some effort into developing your site, then Headway may be the thing for you.