WordPress is the choice of many small business owners for their website. If they’ve been around the block with different themes, most have landed on Thesis for WordPress or maybe competitor Headway. I’m a Thesis guy and I discovered it by way of Brian Clark at Copyblogger. Chris Pearson and Brian Clark recently split paths and Brian moved to working with StudioPress and it has officially merged into a new company under Brian’s leadership. You can read about it here, if you are interested.
It sounds pretty exciting for the Copyblogger team and I’m happy for them. I had not been keeping up (surprise, surprise) with all the news on this front and was taken back. I see some of the picture now and while it doesn’t change my loyalty to Thesis it does make me wonder about the long term. As a scout for my small biz readers, I’ll keep informed and let you know if there’s a reason to migrate. We’ll try StudioPress out on a site or two down the road and report back, too. But at this point, I don’t see myself moving away from Thesis as it works wonders, is pretty intuitive, and has an amazing support forum.
Some of the official news from the above link:
About Copyblogger Media, LLC
Joining Brian Clark and myself [Brian Gardner] in this new venture as partners are Sean Jackson (creator of Scribe SEO), Tony Clark (co-creator of Teaching Sells, Third Tribe, and a new WordPress product called Premise), and Sonia Simone, Senior Editor of Copyblogger and co-founder of Third Tribe with Brian, Chris Brogan, and Darren Rowse.
As a full-fledged new media company, Copyblogger Media, LLC will have multiple lines of business, including online education and live events. But the thing that caught my attention was Brian’s vision for a suite of software tools, specifically for the WordPress space. As you may know, Brian Clark no longer works with Chris Pearson and Thesis, so there was a missing part.
Also in that news announcement was a new product that I’ve been planning to try: Scribe, an SEO platform for content optimization.
Engaging content makes the difference online, but unless you also spoon feed it to search engines, you don’t benefit from profitable, targeted traffic. Scribe makes SEO simple by providing powerful tools for finding the right keywords, optimizing content for search, and building quality links.
Finally, in the news post was a hint about something else that’s coming soon from the new Copyblogger Media empire 
:: a new WordPress tool called Premise. This promises to help you with conversion optimization, or, as we simply say — improving your website sales. How do you move people along a path, encourage them along the different paths they might take on your site, and get them to buy? It appears that Premise will answer some of that and we’ll be eagerly watching. We’re still huge fans of Copyblogger and the now expanding team.
We’re sad that Thesis is no longer tied to Copyblogger and profiting from Brian Clark’s ideas and vision, but we’re sure that Chris Pearson will continue to provide a rock solid product in Thesis. You can read more about why we like Thesis by clicking here.
