Genesis is a favorite among developers for a number of reasons, but clients have more than a few reasons to love it, too.
What is the Genesis Framework?
Think of it like this: If WordPress is the engine of the car, Genesis is all of the parts. And Genesis child themes—the look and feel of your site—are the paint job. Genesis makes WordPress sites more extensible, more secure, easier to update, and it’s built on great SEO standards. It’s used on over 300,000 sites, and for bigger sites with lots of customization, it’s a helpful layer for building and maintaining excellent code for the lifespan of a site.
The Genesis Framework is much more than a theme, though. It’s a foundation for WordPress sites—an underlying framework of immaculate code that’s easy to work with and provides accelerated, powerful WordPress development. And that’s really what it boils down to: taking WordPress sites to the next level, both for developers and the site owners.
THE GENESIS ADVANTAGE
Once I used Genesis to develop WordPress sites, there was no going back. When I first started building WordPress sites, everything needed to be hand-coded: headers, footers, menus, and more. Not only was it time-consuming, updating to new versions of WordPress ran the risk of breaking that customized code. With Genesis, anything customized is filed separately from the framework code—which is helpful in more than a few ways.
Here are 10 reasons Genesis-powered WordPress sites have some major benefits:
- Get the most out of your site’s SEO. The basics for an optimized site are clean code and great architecture. With support for Schema.org code, which allows you to output microdata in your site’s code, your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) gets even better. Genesis also makes Google Author Identification incredibly simple. Also, all of the Genesis themes get search engine optimized by pros in-house before they’re launched.
- Take the worry out of updating to new versions of WordPress. You can update to new versions of WordPress without losing your customizations. With the Genesis framework, customization happens in child themes, which are like skins that sit on top of the framework to make your site look different. Instead of making changes to the framework itself, all customizations are made to the child theme, in separate child theme files.When it’s time to update to a new version of WordPress, only the underlying code is touched—not your theme. No design breaks or last-minute fixes. No more avoiding updates, or spending hours cleaning up after them. Genesis makes this incredibly easy.
- Updating keeps security locked down. Speaking of updating, WordPress sites that aren’t updated regularly can be vulnerable to getting hacked, which is an expensive, time-consuming hassle. Updating is a cinch with Genesis, keeping your site safe in the long run.
- Run and update multiple sites. With the Genesis framework as your underlying foundation, if you have multiple domains running, it’s easy to update important underlying code across all sites without affecting the child themes on top.
- Want to extend a site’s functionality even more? Genesis makes it easy. Whether you want to put any of WordPress’s many widgets to use—sidebars, forms, social sharing, etc.—Genesis makes this easy to customize without messing with any code. Also, absolutely anything you can see can be moved, changed, deleted, or reconfigured so that your site does exactly what you want. You can choose a different sidebar layout for different pages and posts, create Simple Sidebars for different parts of your site, add custom post types, or even make a homepage full of nothing but widget areas where you can drag and drop content.
- Child themes give you access to beautiful, responsive designs—but you’ll need a developer who knows CSS, PHP, and Genesis Hooks to customize them. Child themes look great right out of the box, but you can edit a child theme as much as you want. Updating a theme happens in a separate file from the framework, so you can make changes to your design without affecting the build of your site, and vice versa—update the underlying code without disrupting the design.This also means that it’s mandatory to use a child theme when you use Genesis. Otherwise, if you’re making your customizations right in Genesis, the next time it updates you’ll lose all of those customizations. Note that it can be tricky to edit child themes without a skilled developer who knows plenty of CSS and PHP, as well as Genesis Hooks. Any design editing has to be done in the “style.css” file, so it’s helpful to know your way around there. But any functionality editing is accomplished with Genesis Hooks, the “functions.php” file, or custom PHP templates. A Genesis pro will also know other helpful workarounds.
- The benefits of HTML5 code. HTML5 is the newest standard, which ensures your site works well with future browser updates. It means better performance for your site, cross-browser compatibility, and a more mobile-friendly design. For clients, that translates to a smoother site with pages that load in just milliseconds.It has other benefits too, like better audio and video, and other features that improve the functionality of your site. I’ll emphasize this again: Genesis is all about clean, concise code, and HTML5 is the best out there.
- It’s backed by a dedicated team of developers, so it’s always updated—and on the cutting edge. The StudioPress team uses coding best practice to continually update and maintain Genesis. Sometimes, themes purchased from smaller developers may get outdated and become incompatible with newer technology if they’re not frequently updated. Genesis is backed by a great organization, so you can count on it being a reliable framework for the future.
- Leverage the Synthesis hosting platform for amazing performance. The servers at Synthesis are specifically configured to get the most out of WordPress Genesis sites. This means you’ll get lightning-fast fast load times and be crash-proof during events like traffic spikes from incoming links. The custom server stack at Synthesis is comparable to other high-end hosting services, but it’s optimized for Genesis sites, so it “keeps it all in the family.” Have a lot of images or data? It’s worth looking into Synthesis to ensure fast connections and a good user experience.
- And of course, you’re getting access to the whole WordPress kitchen sink. Genesis child themes can be integrated with all the WordPress features you love:
- Comments
- Advertising widgets
- Sidebars, headers, and footers, in any configuration
- Featured image capability, which Genesis allows you to adjust the size of to suit your theme
- Any WordPress plugin, plus some dedicated Genesis plugins, too. You’re not limited to Genesis-specific plugins, but they’re convenient because you know right off the bat they’ll be compatible with your theme. Definitely take the time to evaluate what plugins you need, though. Some features of Genesis make WordPress plugins moot, and it’s always good to get rid of excess plugins to keep your site running smoothly.
Investing in Genesis: a developer’s perspective
From a developer’s standpoint, there’s a ton of value in investing in Genesis.
- First, it’s very affordable for all that it offers. Once you’re signed up, you can build an unlimited number of sites with Genesis—no cap, no max. If you opt for the Developer Pro, you’ve got unlimited access to themes, and you can use it on as many sites as you want.
- For each of these Genesis sites, you’ll get unlimited, lifetime support if you need it, which includes access to the Genesis team of experts and a community forum maintained by over 134,000 active users. Throw your question up in one of the support forums, or seek out a tutorial for something specific on Google search.
- However, support probably won’t be on your radar all that often, and that’s because the underlying Genesis framework is incredibly user-friendly. It’s easy to learn, and once you learn it, you know it forever. While child themes may have variations on how they work, the framework itself doesn’t change. Developers can learn how the Genesis scaffolding works and apply that knowledge to every site they build with it in the future.