There are a lot of great YouTube videos that shows you the ends and outs of Genesis. I do agree that I wish you could try them out before you buy them. Maybe like a 3 for $129 or so plan. You can purchase all their themes for $499, though. It might be kind of high, but if you do one website for a client it will pay for the $499 🙂

Thanks for letting me know about the MH Magazine theme. I haven’t used it but would be interested in checking it out more. I was looking at their website, and it does look like it does have a lot of really cool features. I have written a post on business premium themes I have used over the years: https://tbwhs.com/blog/best-wordpress-themes-business/

For Thesis I have used it over they years but did find it kind of complicating to use. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it, though.

I have been a Genesis user for almost 2 years now. Before I was using a free theme (was still new to website building) and didn’t like the design layout. It’s probably a biased opinion but it was through Genesis that I discovered the power of CSS. The good thing is that there are so many YouTube videos that would teach you how to do your own styling using Genesis as a reference – for free. So that’s really a bonus.

The only thing that I wish they would consider is offering a free trial for each child theme so that we can test out which is best for our site before deciding. The reason I say this is because I have problem finding the right dimension for a desired logo and after months of trial and error, I discovered that my theme can’t support what I want. That’s fine but I wish I had known earlier (not very tech savvy here) so that I didn’t have to waste my time.

Otherwise, I am quite happy with the overall outcome and would definitely consider using other child themes for my next online business idea.

I currently have a yearly subscription with Elegant Themes, but it would probably be smart to upgrade to a life time membership!

You could always hire someone at https://www.studiopress.com/genesis-developers/ to make the necessary changes for you. It might not be the best option to go ahead and purchase the framework. Might want to ask one of the Genesis designers before doing it.

Hope that helps.

I am really specific about what I want though. I am not even sure if it’s something that would work with Genesis, but I figured it would be a good place to start.

There is always going to be some kind of learning curve to any WordPress framework. For newbies or those that don’t know any HTML or PHP, they might find it hard to use. For instance, working with visual hooks might be very confusing. Also, if you want to switch different elements around on individual pages or post it might be kind of confusing.

Don’t get me wrong; Genesis is great, but those are a couple points that I feel might be problematic for some webmasters.