EDIT (May 14, 2010): Headway has released 1.6.5 and it is a HUGE improvement on this version. Check out my blog about the new and improved Headway,

I’m pretty disappointed with the Headway Theme. As an affiliate of theirs I wanted to write a really great review to help people get know about Headway. But after testing the theme I just can’t find a lot of good reasons to use it.

The idea is good.

I think the idea behind Headway is genius and that it could have a lot of potential in the future. (That is possibly something it has in it’s favor: you get future releases of Headway forever when you buy.) So maybe the next release will be better – but for now….

Get ready to code.

The sad but true reality of the so called “Do it yourself” themes is that there’s no way to get around coding. As much as they would like to make you think otherwise, the same goes for any “Do it yourself” theme like Thesis, Headway, and WP-remix. (That said, I have found Headway to be generally better than both Thesis and WPRemix.)

Flexibility is lacking

While you can make small customizations with Headway, major changes still need to be done from the code. Luckily WordPress has a built in Theme Editor which allows you to change code without needing to save and upload it.

However, if you are using the built in code editor that comes with WordPress – it begs the question: Why would I download the Headway theme? And to be honest – thats a pretty good question.

When I set out to write this review I was excited to see how Headway would change the WordPress designing experience – but I found that it doesn’t really change a whole lot. It seems cool on the outside but is severely lacking what it appears to promise. It’s a classic case of overselling and under delivering. The “bait and switch” – which kinda sucks.

The Support

After 3 hours of reading the documentation and playing around with the theme I felt like I had no stronger of an understanding on how to use it than when I had started – and to be honest I don’t have time to be posting questions in a forum. As someone who knows how to code CSS, flash, PHP, and has a strong understanding of WordPress – I found Headway to be counter intuitive and hard to learn.

Another note about the support: The forums go largely unanswered. After browsing some of the open questions I noticed there were many unanswered ones that were several months old. Who can wait months to get a question answered? Also, these forums are only available to members – meaning Google can’t access them either and the general public can’t get a sense of the support until after they buy!

If you are familiar with Firefox you might be aware of a plugin called “Firebug” which allows you to inspect elements of the page by rolling over them. It is much easier to use Firebug and manually change the code than it is to use the Headway system.

The layout

Another thing that was frustrating was the layout of the panels there are for editing the site. (See image for example)
There are so many panels that they cover the entire page – making it difficult to clear through the clutter on the screen to see what it looks like.

Headway makes more sense where a theme MUST be coded from scratch. But even then, unless you make backup copies of the CSS it doesn’t appear that you can save the setup of Headway.

For example, after I installed the theme and made some changes I decided to switch back to my original theme for a while. When I had some time later in the day, I switched the Headway theme back on. I realized at that point that nothing I had done previously was saved as it went back to the default installation. Pretty scary…

Bottom Line

Headway, Thesis, and other “Do it yourself” themes are a pretty cool idea. But when the rubber hits the road they just don’t cut it. I recommend finding a pre-made WordPress theme from a reputable company like Woothemes and modifying it manually using code to fit your design.

Good parts of Headway:

-It is pretty simple to change things like text, colors, and sizing.

-Easy to add header

-The idea behind the “leafs” is pretty good.

My wishlist for future releases of Headway:

-Get rid of the floating panels in the design view and make them more stationary in an exterior area off to the left (much the same as the back-end of WordPress). Right now there is to much clutter

-Make everything more editable and intuitive. For example: The option for a post image thumbnail was a good idea – but the lack of ability to edit it’s sizing is a pretty major setback design-wise. Also, how to choose things like “the excerpt” vs showing the full post are not very clear.

-Allow for other basic CSS properties like background images.

-Improve the documentation on the website to be more clear

-When saving the changes you have made, it is very slow to update and also resets all panels – like the “leafs” panel going back to “Disabled”. It would be nice if this ran faster and didn’t put as much of a strain on the server.

-Provide a backup option so the theme layout can easily be saved to a hardrive.