david-gorathia

Buddy and I just purchased Vigilance for use on one website – we are diving into the code and find it to be amazing. Not since Sandbox – no longer supported atm – have we seen stuff so well thought out.

Really Really think hard about having a drop down menu – imo and that of 99% of all webdevelopers, they are counter productive to a fluid webuser experience.

Hiding navigation elements from your visitors is never a good idea unless you 100% have to and can’t create room elsewhere.

But honestly, what bussiness are you running that needs more than 6-8 pages in a navigation menu?

I don’t know a single person on the face of the earth that likes to “guess” what a website might be hiding in a navigation menu – I hate them when I see them on websites. Unless you are already at the lvl of Amazon.com – DONT use a drop down menu.

Pay him the $39 for the theme and stop being cheap.

Ill toss my vote in for Vigilance – testing it right now and about to fork over the $40 bones to Jestro. Seems better than thesis that I have been running…and here is why:

Dynamic H1 tags – wow. Very cool. A few of my posts have jumped dozens of places up the google ranks because of this feature.

Cleaner code for Vigilance. Thesis is getting VERY bloated with its newest 1.5 version. It outputs a nasty 20k file for its backend interface that Vigilance doesn’t have. Sure 20k isn’t much but it can slow things a bit and I would rather have that 20k to place icons or pictures on my site.

* I hope the Vigilance designer keeps the code trim and avoids the temptation to include every custom option known to man. I see people using Thesis themes creating some horrible typography and annoying layouts “just because they can.” *

I also like the position of the article tags in Vigilance as wells as its comment bubble location. It cleaverly places beautiful white space around the post title.

Vigilance creates awesome lists from tag links and category links – OH I hope he never removes this feature. I used to hand code this into older themes (thesis does a list as well so in this reguard both themes are similar – Vigilance is cleaner looking and loads faster) and it was annoying as all heck.

Lastly, Vigilance handles complex plugins with much greater ease than Thesis does – by this I mean plugins that produce ajax, javascrip, or plugins that generate image galleries. Thesis is a headache to get working with some of these plugins but Vigilance hasn’t had trouble with any I have tossed at it so far.

The only other theme that has impressed me as much as Vigilance is Tarski – very lean and mean – but right now Vigilance is my favorite. Ill update this post with pictures and comparisons if anyone cares when I get back from work.

My .02 cents