I’ve downloaded the final version of Headway 3.0 just right now, I simply can describe it in only one word “WOW”! Yes, you’ve heard me, it’s the only word I could use to express my feeling right now! And, by the way, I’ve writing this review while installing Headway 3.0 and playing with it, so it’s a sort of a live theme review 🙂
[box type=”note”]The very first thing that you should pay attention to is not to install Headway 3.0 on a live blog! Why?[/box]
It’s highly recommended that you install Headway 3.0 on a new blog, a brand WordPress installation would be perfect to play with ! Don’t attempt to use it on you live blog and expect it will perform the same, simply because everything is brand new in Headway 3.0, however you can keep your old version of Headway, but all 3.0 settings will be isolated from the old version, and you will be able to switch between the two versions.
Alright? Now read the rest of my headway 3.0 review …
Get started with Headway
Now that you’ve installed Headway on your blog, and activated the theme, you will get the first welcome page plus a message that says “Gettting started with Headway”, if you are ready to jump in and be amazed, then enter the visual enter, and say “WOW”!
Headway visual Editor
This exactly what I’ve been looking for!
Some time ago I designed a skin for Thesis Theme that helps you to easily create landing pages using Thesis and the WordPress widgets system, this made the layout of the page easier to design and control, also the ability to drag & drop any widget on the page up and down to arrange it is super! Anyways, that was a couple of years ago, I think there are better ways to do it today!
The main issue is that you can create only one landing page per site, however this is ideal for one page sites where internet marketers focus on designing only one awesome page to sell a product!
But, this is not a visual editor or anything from that, so I was looking for a better solution, something that really imposers my clients, like Headway theme!
Headway’s visual editor is just amazing, I like the tool tips that take your through ever part of the UI and explains to you what it dose. I kept clicking on the next button to check all the parts before I start playing around with Headway 3.0.
I must mention the UI search functionality, it’s called the “visual editor search”, I find this very cool feature, let’s say you are lost and want to find a specific options of tab, you can simply search for it, this is super handy feature!
Really nice stuff so far!
Headway Grid System
The grid system is amazing, you can switch between the grid and preview mode which allow you to preview your changes live, really cool!
This version of the theme has many cool features, and I can not really mention them all here in this review of Headway theme, so I will share the most stuff I like most:
- The ability to add multiple widgets to your blog, basically you will be able to widgetize your blog exactly the way you want it to be!
- Same thing applies for custom menus as well, so imagine you need a top navigation, sidebar menu, and another custom menu to display on the footer, yes.. this can be done so easily!
- The ability to assign custom CSS classes to blocks.
- I love the code block, it’s just freaking awesome to add your code in the box and see real time results on the grid, see below:
Isn’t it great ?
Don’t get so excited!
You can switch to Headway 3.0 from another framework if you would like to, but please don’t get so excited, think about it, switching from a theme to another is not really a great thing, that why I haven’t changed my theme since I started to use Thesis on this blog! I even tested Genesis Framework heavily and I love it, that’s why I used it for developing a website recently for a client!
But I won’t think to move from Thesis to Genesis because my blog has a very heavy customization, I don’t want to start over unless there is something really big is happening!
Before you switch to Headway from another framework, make sure that you actually need to make a switch!
Otherwise install Headway on a new blog!
Update:
13 Dec. 2011 – A lot of time passed since I published this review, it seems that I was wrong about a few things, so I decided to update my review and mention these things that I don’t like, manly it’s about lack of updates and bug fixes, the horrible support forum platform they are using (which is hard to navigate), there is no any good documentations, plus I can not see the new child themes rolling out yet! So, I had to change the rating from 5 to 3.
So, no matter what your decision is, I would like to hear it!
Update 2 :
24 July 2012 – I had to update this review again since Headway Extend (Theme & Blocks) has been rolled out. Headway added 4 child themes plus several awesome blocks. These blocks looks really good and it will help you add great visuals to your blog.
Now, I have a reason to rate Headway framework higher than before, especially that I know that their team is really working hard to make it better, and they provide an excellent support.