Review of the Genesis framework for wordpress

No page builder

Compared to multipurpose themes like Avada and Enfold, the Genesis framework has no dedicated page builder. It limits the options to build a homepage. I have tried to use WPbakery with Genesis but the result wasn’t great.  You must like CSS and PHP if you want to build a genesis theme. The default theme requires a significant amount of work before it would be ready. Nevertheless, It is the same problem for every multipurpose theme. I don’t know any multipurpose theme that does not require to modify the CSS styles to be acceptable.

No advanced theme settings

There aren’t advanced theme settings like for Avada or Enfold. With the genesis admin panel, you can choose the default layout (sidebar left, right, no sidebar). You can add or remove breadcrumbs.  You can add header and footer scripts. There are few theme settings. However it is not a problem. 

Using the styles.css file from the genesis theme, you can customize the theme and get a better result than modifying the themes options panel of Avada or Enfold. 

Webhooks

Genesis has many webhooks so that you can modify the theme and its SEO thanks to functions that you add to functions.php. It is not complicated at all. Since the Genesis community is very active, people post their code online and you just need to copy and paste it into your website. 

Child themes

The use of the black and white gives a stylish classy aspect to the Genesis child themes. Black and white are a good starter for designing a website. This helps to start from a really neutral design.

Advantages of a simple framework

Nowadays, many template web designers add too many functionalities to their website. They are scared that buyers who find their theme to be too simplistic. So, they CSS effects, CSS animations, icons, graphics. In the end, after buying a theme, you end up spending your time removing the transitions, the CSS “fadin” effects, the header resizing. The Genesis framework and its child themes remain simple and easy to use. Also, the Genesis framework is like a well-coded blog. This means it is a very neutral design, there aren’t ugly CSS around widgets titles, there aren’t crazy blog masonry by default that isn’t in line. I think about the DIVI masonry grid in the blog layout. 

Opinion

I have criticized the Genesis framework but sitecozy.com uses the Genesis framework. Since we already had our CSS style customization and PHP functions for Genesis, it took us 1 day to build sitecozy.com using Genesis. We used also Elementor for the homepage and it was ok.

On top of that, the Genesis framework is cheap because you can use it many times as you want on a new installation. Few people understand this among the web developers. When you use a theme, you may install a theme on a test platform, on a dev. platform and on a production platform. You may use a theme for a website that will perhaps not work…

A Genesis framework buyer should be ready to use CSS styles to create its own custom-made Genesis websites.

If I compare the time spent to build an Avada-based, an Enfold-based and a Genesis-based website, a Genesis website isn’t longer to develop because I had to dive into the CSS styles every time.