I spend most of my time on BYOBWebsite teaching people how to build small business websites, not blogs or personal websites. I teach people who are generally trying to make money off of their website either through getting new customers, new clients, new leads or selling their products. So the first question I think we really want to ask is why would we use Genesis for small business website?
Choice of Polished Child Themes
The first answer to that question is because there are a huge choice of relatively polished child themes.
Studio Press Themes
Let’s go over to Studio Press and then Shop For Themes so you can see the selection. You can see they have a pretty large selection of not overly flashy, fairly simple but feature-rich child themes that can be used with Genesis.
You can still use Genesis and have your website end up looking quite a bit different than every other Genesis website simply because of the large selection of child themes.
Third Party Themes
Not only does Studio Press create child themes but there are also community child themes as well. These are written by third party developers and you’ll find various third party themes here as you look around the website.
Themedy.com Themes
So you’ve got Studiopress themes, third party themes and then there are other sources of child themes as well. My favorite and most recommended source is Themedy, themedy.com. They create child themes for Genesis and skins for Thesis and they also have a substantial catalog of very polished looking themes.
All of the child themes that you see here are all responsive, they’re all configured to work with Genesis 2, they all have the HTML5 capabilities and there is a pretty good selection of choices here from which to choose.
Great Support
In addition to having a wide variety of choices of child themes, they also have massive support. Themedy itself has a great support forum all by its lonesome but Studio Press has a very large support forum. In fact, let’s come over to the forum here so you can see that there are thousands and thousands of topics and responses and posts. You can get an awful lot of support here, people post questions and get answers here constantly all day long.
Genesis Specific Plugins
There are also a very large supply of Genesis specific plugins. Let’s head over to WordPress and search for Genesis and you see there are 171 plugins here. So there are all kinds of addons, extras and add additional functionality that you can add to you site by using some of these additional plugins. And we’re going to take a look at some of those today. Genesis probably has the largest number of Genesis specific plugins on the wordpress.org.
Modern Theme Features
Yet another reason to choose Genesis as a platform for a small business website is that many of their skins have all of the modern theme features that you expect in a theme that’s really optimized for a small business.
Responsiveness
First, most of their themes are responsive meaning that they all shrink and down and look good on a mobile device.
SEO Options
Secondly, all of their themes include quite sophisticated Search Engine Optimization options. So you don’t really need a plugin with Genesis to take care of your Search Engine Optimization although they also interface very nicely with SEO plugins. Either way, their SEO facility is as advanced as possible.
Very Secure, Optimized
They do take advantage of the latest WordPress advances so they’re very secure, there are highly optimized code and they use all the latest WordPress APIs. Also with Genesis 2, an awful lot of the themes are HTML5.
HTML5
HTML5 provides you with some semantic markup which will aid in your Search Engine Optimization as well as adding structured data to your posts and pages. I think this HTML5 feature is critical for use on small business websites.
And those are the reasons why I recommend using Genesis 2 for small business websites. You’ve got a large choice of themes, there’s spectacular support, there’s a large array of theme specific plugins and they do embrace all of the modern theme features. You’re not going to get stuck with something that’s antiquated or using deprecated WordPress functions or anything like that.