Headway Base is a WordPress theme framework designed to make building your WordPress website as easy as building with blocks. Headway Base is a bit of a newcomer as a top-tier WordPress framework option, but the recent release of Headway Base 3 is truly innovating and groundbreaking, and really pushes the boundaries of WordPress.

Without knowing any code, you can use the Headway framework to quickly and easily build blogs, business websites, online magazines, landing pages, and much more.

The Headway framework features an intuitive layout grid designed to let you build your website in 3 easy steps:

1. Place Your Blocks – this includes your layout specs including your header, navigation menus, content, widget areas, sidebars, footer, columns, banners etc.. You can then easily drag the blocks around on the page to arrange and resize them. Each block has its own options panel so you can fully cusomize them individually.

2. Set Your Options – this includes setting things like your header image, tagline, and background options.

3. Customize Everything – Use the Headway Design mode to set all your backgrounds, fonts, line height, widgets, navigation options, breadcrumbs, borders, rounded corners, shadows, styles for hyperlinks and much more.

The bread and butter of the Headway framework is the very impressive drag-and-drop visual design editor, which is unlike anything else available for WordPress. Want to change the background color of your header? It’s as easy as clicking on the header and selecting a new color (rather than digging through menu options), and see the change instantly on the backend of your site. Want to move your sidebar from the right to the left? It’s as easy as just dragging it across your screen. It even includes a Visual Search Editor that lets you do a text search for a specific option or tab.

Headway lets you use an unlimited amount of sidebars, enable transparency in objects, use a fluid header, includes Gzip compression without needing a plugin, and so much more.

The Headway Theme Options Panel:

Another great benefit of Headway is the outstanding SEO options. Having Headway means you can use fewer plugins on your site for SEO purposes. You have the ability to set individual title tags separately from post or page headlines and write a meta description, and includes a search results page preview so you can see how each page will display on the search engines (this is a feature some of the popular WordPress SEO Plugins have, but it’s unique to have it built into the framework). Another unique search engine optimization feature is the ability to create SEO templates, which let you set site-wide SEO title and description options. As Headway notes on their website, “Google has stated they’re going to start factoring in link relationship information into their search rankings. Specifically, rel=author link relationships will factor more into search rankings than in the past. Headway takes this into account and automatically uses the rel=author attribute where needed”.  Another great thing about Headway is that it also gives you the option to use 3rd party WordPress SEO plugins if you don’t want to use the built-in options.

Headway Seo Options:

If you are a developer, Headway welcomes you to use the framework to develop sites to sell and for building sites for clients. If you are a coder, Headway features powerful developer tools that will save you a lot of time and make your job easier. Headway’s code base has designed to give you the tools that enable finely-tuned customization like no other WordPress theme framework out there. Headway features an outstanding Live CSS Editor that lets you see the changes live on the page, so there’s no need to upload and then refresh web pages. -It’s like having the most useful part of Google’s Developer’s Tools built right into the backend of your site. Headway also includes a Blocks API that lets you create custom Block types to use in many page templates for you or your clients. Headway was designed to let you easily build child themes, with advanced editing features not seen in other WordPress frameworks.

The Headway Live CSS Editor:

While Headway plans to being selling child themes in the near future, it differs from most other WordPress theme frameworks in that it was designed to be a great option as a ‘standalone’ website builder,  giving you the ability to create and edit your own design and layout through the visual editor. Headway was designed to be compatible with nearly all WordPress plugins and widgets, letting you further customize your site.

Main Pros of Headway

• The Visual Editor. Headway’s strongest point is the amazing live visual editor. It is so original that it’s easy to forget that you’re even using WordPress. Being able to see your changes live in the screen lets you easily try out a lot of options before making the changes live, and sure beats constantly saving your admin screen and refreshing your browser.

• SEO Options. With several other theme frameworks that have built-in SEO options, if you want to use a 3rd party SEO plugin like Yoast or All-In-One SEO, you’re out of luck without editing the theme files (as there’s usually not an option to disable the built-in SEO). Headway lets you easily use either the included SEO or a plugin. While built-in SEO options are are a great feature (and reduces the amount of plugins you’re using), using a WordPress SEO plugin can make it easier to switch between different WordPress themes and frameworks.

• Configure all aspects of your site without touching any code. A lot of WordPress themes include option panels that let you configure different parts of your site, but the Headway framework lets you easily configure virtually every part of your site – all without  touching the CSS file.

Cons of Headway

• Lack of Child Themes – While Headway is planning on selling child themes soon, there are currently very few child themes available (and are only offered by independent developers). The framework is great for creating blogs, magazine and news websites, and small business websites, but more advanced websites would be tough to create without knowing how to code.

• Learning Curve – While Headway is incredibly flexible and powerful, there is a bit of a learning curve, especially if you’re used to a frameworks Thesis or Genesis. The Headway editor is very original, and quite different from all of the other WordPress theme frameworks and theme option panels out there. It’s not even that Headway is difficult to learn – it’s really not, at least if you have some knowledge of web design terminology. It’s just that there are so many customization options, that it will take some time to learn them all.

• It can be tricky to switch to Headway from a different framework. It is probably best to use Headway for setting up a new blog or business website. Since it is so unique, migrating over from a different theme or framework can be challenging.

• Documentation - Headway seems to pride itself in providing documentation in ‘Plain English’, and while their documentation is pretty easy to understand, there just isn’t a lot of it. I’m someone who prefers to dive right in and learn things on the fly, but if you like to learn by reading extensive tutorials and documentation, you might be a bit disappointed. That said, Headway does have some very helpful video tutorials, and does seem to be making an effort to improve their documentation.

The amount of satisfied Headway users is quickly growing, and reviews from raving fans of the framework are continually popping up. Put simply, people who learn how to use the Headway framework love it. While Headway is still pretty new, it is already one of the best WordPress frameworks available. When more child themes (and hopefully better documentation) become available for Headway, I have a feeling the number of happy Headway customers will skyrocket.