Why we love Canvas by WooThemes

This article is now depreciated. We haven’t worked with the Canvas theme in many years, having replaced it with the BeaverBuilder theme or GeneratePress.

This WordPress Wednesday post is just a quick overview of the Canvas Theme and Framework from Woothemes. We’ve been following (and using) WooThemes since early late 2009.

There are several framework themes including Canvas, Genesis, and Thesis to name some of the top few, but when it comes to ease of use and customizing, Canvas takes the cake. We use it on many of our web design projects and have never had any issues with it. So, why exactly is it so good?

Incorporates blog styling and corporate styling very well

WordPress started as mainly a blogging platform, but quickly grew into an excellent content management systems for business and corporate websites. Most of the time, when you look for premium themes online, you will find either a nice looking blog style theme or a nice looking corporate theme. Rarely do you find a theme that has a good stating point for both.

It looks good out of the box

I use this theme for my personal blog without many customizations at all, and non that are too complicated for the average user to do. Although it’s quite minimalistic, it’s very nice.

No need to write code

Canvas has a wonderful theme manager that gives you the ability to change the layout, colors, and styling of almost anything without ever having to edit CSS. Here’s a quick screen shot of the admin area:

It also makes use of custom post types in order to let you quickly and easily add additional content. By default it comes with a Portfolio section, Feedback or Testimonial section and a JQuery slider for the business style.

Hooks for additional functionality

This is probably the main reason I love this theme. If you are looking to do a custom designed website, hooks are perfect. No need to edit the actual framework, instead you can use the built-in hook manager to add html code as you need it to fit with your design. Canvas always allowed you to add your own custom CSS in order to change the look and feel of your site, but now you can easily add in html to wherever you need with the hook manager. It has many places to add your html to including the header, navigation area, main body, and footer. Below is a screen shot of the hook manager.

There is so much that you can do with this theme. For example, Oui Coach, and Cash for Gold, are all running off of Canvas. They all have their unique style and look to them, yet all benefit from the extremely powerful backend that Canvas provides – both to the developer and to the end user.

This was actually going to be a demo video of Canvas, when I realized that (obviously) WooThemes already has a great demo. You can check out the demo video here.

If you are interested in picking up this theme, or any of the other great WooTheme themes:

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