Update on Thursday, March 06, 2014:
I am now quite comfortable with Genesis and slowly phasing out Builder from my toolset.
Today one of my clients mailed me:
I see you switched your site over to Genesis. I am quite surprised to see you did that. I’m glad you will now know your way around Genesis, but I am quite curious to understand what motivated you to make the move. You were pretty set on ithemes as I remember.
I was asked the same in UWDMSG WordPress Skype group and by another iThemes user via GTalk.
Therefore I just want to take some time to write why I switched this site’s theme from Builder to Genesis.
Just a few months ago I was in the minority camp that did not like Genesis. But a ton of never-ending glorious reviews made me take a second look at it again last week. I started playing with Genesis Sample child theme and was totally frustrated by not being able to figure out how to add a darned logo image linking to the site URL in the header, a pretty basic task if you will. The standard practice seems to be setting the image as a background for one of the header elements which didn’t make sense to me. Luckily I stumbled across this post that shared the same sentiment and provided a nice working solution.
Browsing StudioPress forums, I saw two users that would benefit from my discovery. I shared the link and provided further CSS to help them. Their thank you replies encouraged me and soon I was going through other posts, downloading various Genesis child themes and helping others. 3 days and 200 forum posts later, I slowly got the hang of Genesis. I saw a ton of real-world sites built on Genesis through all this and really liked how compact the generated HTML is, how fast the sites were loading (in general) and how beautiful they looked – especially the typography.
Thus changing this site’s theme just happened to be a natural progression. Luckily it was made easy, thanks to WP Engine‘s staging feature. I copied the live site to staging with a single click, set up the theme over there and once happy with it, implemented the same on the live site (even though I could copy from staging to live).
Now does this mean that I will stop using iThemes Builder to create new websites? Absolutely not. There is no theme that is as flexible as Builder at this moment for me. I can probably write the CSS selectors without even Firebugging and in my sleep when working with Builder. There is nothing to think, nothing to refer to, I just go methodically from top to bottom and can create or re-create any website with Builder usually in 4 to 5 hours. All this came with the experience of making over 22,000 posts helping others in iThemes forum. Some may say, you can do any PSD to WP using Genesis as well but I have not reached that stage of expertise and experience with it yet.
So for PSD/HTML/existing sites to WP, I will continue to use Builder.
If the clients like any of the turnkey theme designs from StudioPress, I will use Genesis for such projects.
I hope that I will master Genesis to such a level where I can use just that to build/re-build any kind of website. I am just not there yet.
And, just for my own future reference here’s (1 MB jpg) the old design.
Cool Sridhar! The site looks terrific and I think it’s great that you’re expanding into other themes, and helping the people who use them.
Nice new site Sridhar. Which child theme is this? I have a client that uses Genesis and have learned some about it. Are you not working the boards at iThemes support anymore?
Hi Chris,
The theme is Sixteen Nine Pro.
May 31st was my last day at iThemes.
Well, that answers why I can’t get any resolution over at ithemes. The Coverage theme has a terrible bug and I’m afraid my only alternative is to switch themes. Nearly every product page I built has it’s own layout and I’m hoping I will be able to save most of my customization.
Glad to have found you again Sridhar!
Hi Smith,
Genesis is pretty cool. Welcome to this part of WordPress.
You will find things cleaner, simpler and beautiful.
Great post Sridhar, and good to see you have taken the plunge to move to Genesis. It is a huge powerful tool, and in time you will make your own child themes. Why not invest time in using Dynamik Web Builder from Cobalt Apps. Erik has done a superb job of making a web builder for Genesis with incredible PHP builder, conditional builder and CSS builder. However I normally write up my own classes.
One site I hope to have finished this week can be seen her using Genesis and DWB
http://fullerdemo.com.au/stpetersgirls
It is a rather complex site, but a great example of what can be built.
Thanks for your suggestion Ciaran. I do own a copy of Dynamik and it is good.
Hi
Welcome to the world of genesis – during the last couple of years I have tried a few different types of frameworks and have also settled on genesis and in regards to your last comments in this post where you say that you hope you to master Genesis to a level where you can use it to build / re-build any kind of website – I have some advice for you which I hope will be of help.
When I first started using genesis I was picking from their child themes a close match to a rough layout that I wanted and customising it from there however depending on the original author of the child theme this created a situation where I would do some css customisations which ‘could’ have been re-useable in other themes but they had used different class names,which created a situation where my library of reuseable customisations was specific to that child theme.
So in the end I decided to just pick one single theme (something simple and basic like minimum pro) and invested in the ‘Genesis extender plugin’ by Cobalt.
Using the same theme means that you can know it inside out, you can share and reuse your customisations across all your sites and it doesn’t mean that all your sites will look the same either as the extender plugin will give you all the flexibility to add your own sections / hooks / widgets / layout elements / functions and scripts to allow you to re-create any site that you see out there with the added bonus that you can export any interesting layout snippets that you create to import to other sites and all the css classes and ids will all be constant (being the same theme).
So my advice is pick one child theme, learn it’s naming of things behind the scenes, extend the theme with features and layout elements you need with genesis extender and you’ll master it a lot quicker than having to rename and re-invent each time you use a different child theme.
It’s a bit of a learning curve to get your head around initially setting up and requires patience but when you start getting to a point where you look at a fresh install of a new site and you look at this basic minimum theme and you go to your library of snippets that you’ve built up – In a couple of copies and pastes later and an import of a past couple of genesis extender files, you can convert this basic theme into a shopping layout, a magazine layout, a brochure site with slider areas, an estate agency / job vacancy site etc. all generated quickly from the same theme – it is quite a time saver.
Hope this helps
Mark
Thanks for your detailed reply Mark. I already have Genesis Extender and wrote a couple of articles on using it.
Hi Mark,
I’m new to Genesis / Dynamik and am doing some research. I’m really curious to know why you picked using Genesis Extender with a child theme like Minimum Pro vs using Dynamik itself.
Would you mind sharing what you see as the benefits of this over using Dynamik as the child theme? It would seem like Dynamik without other child themes would be more of a clean slate. Also, if you changed child themes, your code snippets may not work, while if you started with Dynamik then you would be staying with it indefinitely.
Thanks,
Dan
Same question I have.
Hi
Sorry for the belated reply. At the time of my original reply I had already spent lots of time working with extender and a ‘single’ genesis child theme so I had already got into a routine of doing things that way with a library of personal snippets that could morph the same child theme into looking and working like any layout I wanted. (not ideal I know but it worked).
At the time Dynamik was only about 4 months old or so, being updated regularly and I was keeping an eye on it in forums but I wasn’t ready yet to drop a routine until I was sure.
Since my original post I have now indeed moved fully over to Dynamik and I haven’t used a genesis child theme or extender since.
PLEASE PLEASE ADVISE: I am not a programmer, I am a marketer. I know no coding. In the past I used the iThemes builder Interstate child theme because it provided widgets that allowed me to drag and drop to create different layouts. It seemed relatively easy.
I need to update my site and am considering the Genesis themes. But Genesis appears very coding heavy based on all your posts here. I am worried I will not be able to get my site up and running quickly without a lot of customizing. Is that the case? Thank you so much for your response!
Do you plan to use a Genesis child theme of your choice as it appears in the demo site or do you want to add and move things around?
There is one Genesis theme, Decor theme, that pretty much has the exact layout that I would like. I would also like to use the same Decor theme for another blog I am creating, but would like it to look different. The second blog will showcase food items.
It sounds like you will benefit from using either Dynamik (as your child theme) or Genesis extender (on your child theme)
http://cobaltapps.com/downloads/dynamik-website-builder/
http://cobaltapps.com/downloads/genesis-extender-plugin/
Thanks Dan. Do I buy Dynamik and the Genesis theme separately? Or when I buy Dynamkik do I get a Genesis theme with it?
Yes, you would buy them separately as they are made by different companies. Both of them allow for use on unlimited sites. I’m about to purchase them both also!
I’m also looking at using them with http://www.csshero.org as a plugin which allows for live css visual editing of any part of the website.
This is an interesting post. I have been using wordpress for several years, and plan to upgrade my themes to something nicer. I’m also at the point of either building either people’s websites for them OR teaching them to build their own. Am I correct in stating that it would be easier to teach newbies how to build their own sites using Builder (Ithemes), but that if I plan to make websites for others, that I’m better off to go with Genesis? I’m not great with code. Thanks for any help. I’m going to bookmark your site.
The key is customizability (is that a word?). If your newbie students want to make PHP customizations, I think iThemes Builder is better. The reason being, one can easily find the corresponding PHP template file and make changes in it versus using actions and filters in Genesis.
For CSS changes, I used to think iThemes Builder had the edge but with Dynamik or Genesis Extender, now Builder and Genesis are at level.
If your students are at intermediate level or higher, Genesis is the best IMO.
You might want to see http://pixelyzed.com/2013/05/16/the-state-of-my-2013-wordpress-toolset-themes/#comment-6675
Hi Sridhar. Glad to find a great Genesis developer. Your articles here are awesome and very helpful. Thank you for creating them! I started using both Genesis and Dynamik recently on a new site I’m building, and they make changing things much easier for people that don’t want to get too much into the code. All the best.
Hi, Sridhar!
Thank you for your comment. I did head on over to Stephane’s site (and told him that you were the one who pointed me there 🙂 ). I’m probably leaning towards Genesis now, but now I’m just trying to figure out if it’s better for me to go with Genesis child themes and the Genesis extender OR Genesis framework and Dynamik, considering I’m not a coder and neither would be the people I would be teaching. I’m not sure if Dynamik would be too “blank”/”clean slate” for me. I may just have to try something out, knowing that they do offer 30-day guarantees. The fact that Builder doesn’t give you a money-back guarantee is a bit of a deterrent from even trying them out.
Note that the entire Design panel is not available when using Extender.
It is only available with Dynamik.
http://i.imgur.com/HADXUwS.png
Do not let the ultra simplicity of Dynamik’s default front-end look fool you. You can do a lot w/o writing a single line of code using the settings in Design panel.
The choice between Dynamik and Genesis Extender boils down to this in my opinion: If you want to create a custom design for your site easily, use Dynamik. If you like the way a particular StudioPress child theme looks and want to use that as a starting point, get Genesis Extender when you want to take that theme to the next level as it provides an easy interface for managing hooks, widget areas etc.
For you and your students, I recommend Dynamik Website Builder.
I’m going to second Sridhar’s comment. When using Dynamik, you have as much flexibility as your imagination and skill-set would allow for.
Example is my primary business site:
http://weightliftingacademy.com/
I’m not a pro-coder either. but I am a start up founder who runs over 20 websites… most are on what I call my G.O.D. Stack (Genesis On Dynamik 🙂 )
What I love about it is that it doesn’t HIDE the code from you, it just helps you figure out better how to use it. You can click buttons and get amazing changes, and you can also dig under the hood and learn a lot.
I also love iThemes Builder (and also Headway). But I have found that I constantly find myself going back to the GOD Stack.
By the way, Sridhar, I added you on Google Plus (you commented on one of my posts in a forum there). 🙂
Thank you for all your help!
Namaste Sridhar – I’m a Builder user for several years now, and your contributions at their forum have helped me through many hair-pulling sessions. I just purchased the Genesis developer package and at first looks, I’m a little let down. But this page, and Stéphane’s discussion, combined with finding Dnyamik, has given me a lot of hope and excitement. I’m also intrigued by CSS Hero, and they told me they plan to add Builder support.
I love Builder, but the darned deep nested CSS selectors have me frustrated. I know it should be easy and I’ve followed the tutorials but whenever I try a new Builder theme, I become lost once I get deeper than the body or header tags.
Where I thought maybe I was leaving Builder completely for Genesis, I’m seeing now that I’m going to have different tools, for different jobs and I’ll return to Builder for quick jobs. I’m so happy to have found your blog, as I’m pretty sure I’ll be searching your posts quite frequently for Genesis tips!
Thanks for all you do!
Namaste Pam.
I think you will like Dynamik.
Enjoy the ride.
I am very happy that you shifted from iThemes to Genesis otherwise where can i find such awesome posts daily.