Well, it’s up! The new site I’ve been working on for the last couple weeks in my spare time (Sinful Lyrics) is officially live. It basically follows a blog format with each post featuring a lyric from a popular song with some seriously bad lyrics. The site has “7 Deadly Sins of Lyrics” and each song violates one or more of the sins.
The most interesting part of the project for me was getting exposure to the Genesis Framework for WordPress. I had researched both Genesis and Thesis (these seem to be the two front-runners in the industry) and ultimately settled on Genesis. I will probably post more details and specific experiences with the framework down the road but I have to say my overall experience was a positive one.
The $60 price point (this doesn’t even include the theme purchase) is higher than I generally like to pay considering I’m still going to have to do my own design customizations and plugin coding but I do think Genesis makes this easier than native WordPress.
Genesis users generally rave about the hooks and filters that the framework adds to the existing set provided by WordPress. While they are certainly useful, I doubt I would pay for that enhancement alone. The best thing about Genesis in my opinion is simply providing a well-built, solid parent theme to extend with your own child theme. There are plenty of parent themes out there that claim to be useful but in my experience none of them are that spectacular. You shouldn’t need to dive into that messy directory structure that comes with WordPress natively and Genesis makes it pretty easy to do so.
So my overall thoughts are the following: If you are a developer, don’t think Genesis is going to solve your plugin/widget creation needs. There are some decent themes out there for Genesis but almost all cost in the $20 range. I’m happy with the purchase I made because I can use the framework again (and plan to!) and it makes creating a child theme for it extremely simple.
Oh, and go check out Sinful Lyrics while you’re at it, I guarantee your amusement.