Getting the most out of your Genesis theme

I love the category, tag, and custom post type archive settings page. You can add a custom headline and introductory text to any archive page, letting readers know what they’re in for right up front and giving yourself a nice SEO boost.

I looked for a decent post to explain how to do this, but I couldn’t find one, so I wrote one. 🙂

One of the biggest benefits of using Genesis is the fact you can take any functionality or feature from any existing or newly released child theme and add it to your existing theme. The reason you can do this is because all child themes are built to run on Genesis so the code is compatible with any child theme.

The built-in Genesis SEO settings. You might have seen the SEO options available when editing posts and pages, but most people miss the site-wide SEO settings. You can find them by going to Genesis > SEO Settings in your WordPress Dashboard. From there, you can adjust your homepage title and meta description, and assign specific archive pages on your site to be included or excluded in search engines. For example, if you’re the only author on your blog, you probably don’t need the author archive indexed by Google since it’s the same thing as your normal blog.

Genesis has so many great features, but my favorite is the built-in layout options (as easy as clicking a button to choose a full-width, sidebar, or double-sidebar layout) for each page. This makes it so much easier for my clients to create and edit pages just how they want them!

Another worth noting is the great security and fantastic developers. A lot of WordPress themes are full of bad code, and can be quite buggy. Genesis is a solid foundation that helps keep sites secure and running smoothly!

The community is by far the biggest perk. There’s a very helpful forum, incredible Facebook group, and even a Slack chat for designers and developers. Everyone is so friendly and willing to help–whether you’re a newbie or seasoned designer, the community is an incredible resource.

One of the features I love is the archive introductions/descriptions. I think more bloggers should use the Category archive title and descriptions available. It’s a great way to provide an introduction or overview for a Category archive, letting visitors know where they are and what type of articles/posts they will find. It’s also great for SEO if you have your Category archives indexed.

It is also battle tested and backed up by Copyblogger, so you know you’re working with a quality product that is being actively developed and improved. Genesis uses HTML5 markup, the new code standard and supports Schema.org which allows you to output microdata in your site’s code, which is great for SEO.We also love Genesis because it is lightweight, search engine friendly, and follows security best practices.

One of my favorite features of Genesis that some bloggers may not know about is how helpful and amazing the Genesis community is! There are active communities of bloggers using Genesis, as well as professional Genesis designers and developers, on LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook, and there’s even a Slack group! There’s also a large Genesis presence on Twitter. You can use the #GenesisWP hashtag at any time to post a question or comment regarding Genesis (and someone’s always available and willing to help you!), and you can use the hashtag to find people who are sharing Genesis specific tutorials and plugins.

My favorite feature and one that so many users don’t understand is the widgetized homepage. If you are looking at a Genesis child theme, and the homepage layout is more than just a list of blog posts, maybe something similar to a magazine layout. Or perhaps it has a slider and then three boxes below that. From just looking at the demo, or even following the demo instructions, you aren’t always aware of the flexibility of that homepage. Take for example the slider. First of all, you can use it to simple show a single image. It doesn’t have to be a slider. Or since this is a widget area that the slider widget is placed in, you could put another widget in there just as easy. Maybe a video. Or something else. And if you don’t want to use that widget area, don’t put anything in it. It will just disappear and all the content below will move up.

The same goes for those 3 boxes across that are links to recent posts. Those again are widget areas. They could be links to 3 pages, or photos and links of 3 products. See where I’m going with this?

Also, they can be stacked on top of each other in the widget area. So if you have a large image across at the top, 3 boxes below that, you could add one more widget to that first spot below the image and put in some welcome text.

The possibilities are endless.

I would say the feature I see so rarely used is the Author Profile Box.

I could spout off some technical reasons for why I love Genesis, like rock-solid code, impressive SEO, HTML5, schema.org, and the forward-thinking Studiopress team. BUT my favorite things about Genesis include: how easy it is to manipulate for those of us who know just enough code to be dangerous and, of course, the Genesis community.

I don’t think there’s any other framework out there that is more documented and supported by a vast community than the Genesis framework. You can find a tutorial for just about everything. In fact, I can honestly say I rarely feel limited with what we can do with it–and I’ve worked on everything from small basic projects to online shops to vast community sites that require a ton of custom features.