Category Archives: Theme Reviews

Review: The Flavour Theme by ThemeFuse

When building an extravagant restaurant website with all the bells and whistles, a theme such as Flavour from ThemeFuse may just be the best choice. With no external plugins and extensive coding required, you can use this premier restaurant and food café WordPress theme to bedazzle your visitors.

The Flavour Restaurant by ThemeFuse

The Flavour Restaurant Theme: Good For Everything

Whether you’re building a website for a classy Italian restaurant, or a French café, this WordPress theme will be ideal for all kinds of businesses. Bars, coffee shops, bakeries, and even fast food diners can use The Flavour Theme to enhance their appeal and reach out to more visitors.

With several built in options that come with this elegant theme, you can create a highly informational site with a customized homepage fully loaded to display your services and make your calls to action. With its easy to use, single click installation process, The Flavour Theme from ThemeFuse is easy to use for people with very little programming skills and knowledge.

What’s Inside The Flavour

The features developed by ThemeFuse in this simplistic and classy WordPress restaurant website are for common users. The ThemeFuse options panel provides lots of options from altering the background image of the website, the color style of the website, elements in the header section and many more. With the numerous options provided by the ThemeFuse framework, you can personalize the standard design of this WordPress restaurant theme.

Abundant Options

The looks can be deceiving when it comes to this gorgeous minimalistic restaurant theme. Although very compact, this theme is packed with customization options which include color skins, useful icons to depict services and a sizeable font library. With the additional option to change the website logo and favicon, your restaurant website can truly be unique.

Bunch-Of-Options-ThemeFuse-The-Flavour

Moreover, you can also make modifications to the menu page, events page and others regions of the website which are essential for the business. With the shortcodes list provided, you can insert post and page elements such as highlight box, buttons, Google map and paragraphs whenever you need them.

 

HTML5 Animated Slider

With a slider present at the top section of the homepage, The Flavour Theme provides you all that you need. The rich visual representation of the full-width slider design at the topmost section of the page is nothing short of spectacular. With the latest HTML5 animated slider, the website visitors will be impressed without a doubt. The slider also comes equipped with several customization options such as animation style list, feature for time setting, sections for integrating content, custom style background and more.

Slider-by-ThemeFuse-Flavour_WordPress_Theme

Templates For Menu And Gallery

The templates provided by ThemeFuse for this WordPress restaurant website theme are a great asset from a business point of view to display the different types of foods and cuisines. Create a special menu page for food, desserts and salads or form a general menu which can also include aspects such as item time, photo, ingredients as well as its price.

The gallery page of The Flavour works exceptionally well to flaunt all the scrumptious delicacies that your restaurant or café provides. With a page comprising of items from your restaurant, the visitors will be attracted and driven towards becoming your customers. With the filter buttons, visitors can view all the foods together or separately according to their category.

Menu-and-Gallery-Templates-The-Flavour-Theme

Module For Making Reservations

Every exclusive restaurant in town needs a reservation and The Flavour keeps this in mind. While reservations over the phone may still be an active practice, mixed up reservations and last-moment cancellations can cause headaches.

Reservations-Module-The-Flavour-Restaurant-theme

The online reservation system that is integrated into this WordPress restaurant theme helps you create a reservation page to better service your customers and make your business even more efficient. The design and fields of the reservation module can be easily changed and once you receive a reservation enquiry from a visitor, you can accept their reservation request, reject it or contact the customer for further inquiry.

Service Oriented Icons

ThemeFuse designers have put some effort into creating an iconic restaurant theme that caters to the different needs of website owners and their restaurant businesses. There are several engaging icons created professionally to intrigue the visitors and each set of icons fits the website uniquely. The Flavour has been provided the premium touch by the developers to make it the ideal WordPress restaurant website for different types of establishments.

Icons-The-Flavour-WordPress-Theme

The Flavour Theme: Final Verdict

The general tone of the entire review was quite obvious; The Flavour Theme from ThemeFuse is the definition of a perfect WordPress restaurant website theme. From the highly customizable options to the simplistic yet extraordinary design, this theme speaks to the inner artist in you. With a reasonable price tag of $50 including customer support, The Flavour Theme is definitely worth every penny you into it.

The theme is completely responsive, meaning it fits to the screen size of tablets and mobile phones, but looks equally beautiful on desktops or other full screen devices as well. For every restaurant, café or bar that wants to their website to reflect the excellence of their food and atmosphere, The Flavour is everything they need and more.

Responsive-Retina-The-Flavour-Restaurant-template

The Genesis Framework – The Only One You’ll Ever Need

Genesis-Framework-By-Studiopress

I’ve been researching themes for a while now and I’ve never been as awestruck as when I first met the Genesis framework. Here I’ll give you some pointers as to why Genesis is the best thing since sliced bread!

First, let’s get one thing out of the way – why do we call it “a framework”? Well, let’s use a visual metaphor. If we see WordPress as the core of the site, the engine that the site runs on, Genesis is the main set of nuts and bolts that get the thing moving. Then you will use child themes to change the outside of the product – your design and layout. You will put a child theme on top of the parent Genesis theme – the parent theme is where all the main updates happen, while you can keep the changes you’ve made to the child theme independent. This is an option quite a few themes have, but what makes Genesis different is the huge amount of child themes you can use. As Genesis is really popular, it also has a great community and knowledgeable support – so there are a lot of developers that build upon the framework and give us, regular users, a lot of freedom and flexibility.

One of the core features that sets Genesis apart is its use of code “hooks”. Most other themes give you some customization options and widgets and going from there, there isn’t much you can do in terms of placing specific elements on the website. Genesis uses “hooks” that you can use to place elements in your site. So if you want to place an element before your footer, it’s as simple as using the hook “genesis_before_footer”. You see, now you can easily decide where to put the author bio or social media sharing buttons, without coding extensively or wasting time with plugins that don’t always work as expected. There’s a great guide on hooks that I highly recommend over at Genesis Tutorials – it shows just how many placement options you now have. You will have much more control over your website.

Hooks also help clean up the theme code so that it loads much faster and isn’t bloated. Usually, including customization options in the theme you use actually creates unnecessary files in the theme for layout and color options and may bloat up your database – Genesis helps with that and makes your site super lean and clean.

Genesis is created with HTML 5 mark-up and Schema.org microdata – this facilitates your SEO work and will help your positioning. Schema.org explains to search engines what your content contains, which helps your SEO efforts. The framework has built-in SEO options and is optimized for use together with the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast, giving you a bit of an SEO head-start on other bloggers.

The multitude of Genesis child themes is important to highlight – the main point here, as already explained, is that you will only make changes to the child theme without altering the parent Genesis code. This is how you achieve a lot of visual freedom and a level of control. Whether you’re looking for a more romantic feel with Lovely or a classic look with Avett, you will be able to choose your own favorite out of many child theme options and use it easily.

So, here are some of the reasons we love Genesis framework – just give it a try and you’ll see for yourself! Don’t have the time to build or manage your new website, or maybe design and coding is not for you? Try out our partners at WP Support Center to custom design and maintain your WordPress website.

Ideas Theme By AppThemes: A Review

Ideas Theme

Check out the Ideas theme here!

The Ideas theme by AppThemes – not to be confused with the theme of the same name by Themeforest author Imaginem, is a versatile WordPress theme that can be used to gather consumer feedback to better develop your products and ideas. The Ideas theme allows for customers to suggest and then vote on ideas around your products or services. Ideas is easy to set up and use which makes it an excellent addition to any business wanting to gather customer feedback from an audience.

There are many applications for the Ideas theme that can benefit a wealth of company niches, for example: a video game company can utilize the theme as a means for gamers to share tips and tricks for a trending video game. WordPress theme developers could utilize the Ideas theme as a means to gather feedback on features to add or bugs to address with upcoming updates on a current theme. On a more simple note, the Ideas theme could be used as a means to gather customer feedback for future product line suggestions which would allow a company to expand their product offerings by catering to “in demand” product ideas. As you can see, the applications of the Ideas theme are endless!

Ideas Theme Features

The Ideas theme is built with productivity in mind. Utilizing an efficient layout, Ideas offers a feedback system in which customers can not only tell you what they think about existing products and suggest other products, but they can also vote on concepts submitted by other customers too. Here are some features worth highlighting:

● The Ideas theme allows moderation of all submitted concepts to ensure full user control of the site while also still providing the opportunity for customer interaction.
● AJAX and jQuery implementation mean that votes for approved ideas are updated instantly without a page refresh which makes for a great user experience – something which is especially important when trying to gather feedback
● Extended user profiles allow for back-end and front-end viewing of detailed voting activity for each user. This allows you to keep track of productive contributors to your website as well as to link directly to those who contribute the most successful concepts based on customer feedback.
● The Ideas theme offers an API which allows developers to build on to the theme itself to customize its functionality. This means that should you ever want to build your own app based on your site, the app will easily be able to communicate with your site using the API. This opens up a whole new way for you to expand your website to mobile users and expand your customer base.

Pro’s of the Ideas Theme

● Ideas submitted via the Ideas theme can be filtered and sorted easily by votes and responses on the front-end of a site while they can be filtered by author, date, category and status in the admin dashboard. This makes searching through and organizing customer ideas fast and easy so that you can quickly find the most popular submissions made to your site and act on them.
● The Ideas theme is a responsive theme that supports a touch swipe slideshow feature and utilizes retina display images. These two features open up your website to mobile users who make up a significant portion of web surfers these days.
● Ideas offers a variety of submission formats to accommodate various types of idea submission, these include support for YouTube content, Vimeo content, Photowall and Slideshow options. This is an important aspect in terms of the theme’s versatility because it allows for users to submit ideas based on a variety of media formats which will in turn allow you to diversify the products and services that your business can offer.
● The Ideas theme offers a transferable license to purchasers. This makes it easy for web developers to utilize the theme in design projects and transfer the license to the theme after the project is complete. Additionally, if your business is sold or taken over by another individual, a transferable license means that there will be no fees involved in the license transfer as is often the case with other themes.
● Ideas offers a translation ready platform which makes it particularly appealing for those who are looking to reach out to a multilingual or global audience. With a built in language translation for numerous languages, you are able to offer a multi-lingual website without the expense of having your website professionally translated. Being able to reach multi-lingual audiences means expanding your company’s reach as well as taking on culturally diverse user submissions!

Ideas Settings

● Log-in and sign-up pages are themed so they don’t look out of place. This may seem like a simple touch, but for many consumers a personalized touch is what they require to feel comfortable when doing business with a company. Personalizing pages puts a face to the name rather than providing a generic referral from a cookie cutter webpage.
● The Ideas theme has been validated with WC3 coding rules which ensures that the theme will not quickly become obsolete since it utilizes the most up to date coding. This is important because it means that your website theme will be able to keep up with upcoming updates to WordPress as well as newly released plug-ins that you may decide to consider adding to your site in the future.
● Ideas supports shortcodes. Shortcodes allow you to easily expand your theme’s layout by adding things such as drop down menus, formatted columns, and other design elements.
● A comprehensive admin panel in the dashboard allows you to edit the Ideas theme settings without having to weed through lines of PHP code. This means quick changes can be implemented without worrying about the potential of PHP errors that can be common when editing premium themes using the original PHP files.
Con’s of the Ideas Theme

● The Ideas theme can be a little overwhelming which can result in impatience on your part (trust me, I know.) This can easily be remedied by reading through the provided documentation of the theme BEFORE you begin meddling with settings.
● The Ideas theme requires its own WordPress installation, so you’ll want to keep that in mind if you are looking to incorporate it into an already existing site. Perhaps the easiest solution is to set up the site on a sub domain. For example ideas.yoursite.com. If the use of a sub domain does not suit your needs I recommend taking a look at utilizing another theme of your choice and implementing the WP Idea Stream plug-in to enable idea submission for your consumers.
● Ideas offers fewer “frills” than other themes which is simply due to the fact that this theme was built for a very specific purpose whereas most themes are built to fit many different options. If you are looking for a more visually appealing website however, consider utilizing a sub-domain as mentioned above, so that your main website can be the face of your company while still having the Ideas theme for customer feedback.

Recommendation

The Ideas theme is a theme with a very specific use in that it is built with the sharing of ideas in mind. It incorporates functionality and interaction in to a platform that can be easily monitored and monetized for businesses in just about every niche. Whether you are looking to gather ideas for upcoming product lines, receive customer feedback on current product features (for example WordPress themes or plug-ins,) or even to create a forum where users can share suggestions and modifications based on their experiences with your products; the Ideas theme is perfect for improving sales by catering to consumers and encouraging exposure of your brand.

So, would I recommend the Ideas theme? Yes. It could serve as a wonderful bridge between consumers and companies by providing an interactive forum that does not require the monitoring of BBS message boards and avoids the anonymity and one way feedback of e-mail communication. The Ideas theme is one of the best solutions we’ve seen for gathering customer feedback that exists across any platform, WP or otherwise.

When it all comes down to it, Ideas theme by AppThemes provides you with audience polling that almost any company could benefit from. For a small fee, this theme now puts consumer polling in your hands. This theme is available from AppThemes for $99 for a standard license and $159 for a developer license. We recommend that you check it out!

Click Here to Check Out Ideas

Affiliate Board by Color Labs Project

Affiliate Board Theme

The basic principle behind the Affiliate Board theme by Color Labs Project is to make it easy to set up an affiliate program. When it comes to functionality, Affiliate Board offers an easily navigated theme that is simple to set up for the user and easy to use for the consumer looking to purchase affiliate based products and services.

Click here to check it out!

Simply put, Affiliate Board is designed to help you to create a simple, yet professional affiliate site. The layout and features are perfect for a site showcasing services or comparing products. Affiliate Board provides you with everything you need to get off the ground with these types of sites. Before themes like Affiliate Board, this type of marketing was done through the use of plug-ins and believe me when I tell you, things could get very aggravating very quickly trying to bolt plugins together to make a cohesive site. With the introduction of affiliate based themes like Affiliate Board, there is no longer the frustration of sifting through obsolete or poorly functioning plug-ins that don’t “jive” with the theme you have your heart set on. Sure, with Affiliate Board in particular, you won’t find a wide variety of visual layouts (it doesn’t have all the “wow factor” some other themes offer,) but with affiliate marketing, it’s always better to keep it simple.

Affiliate Board Theme Features

Affiliate Board Main Screen

The Affiliate Board theme offers all of the basic features that are required from a simple affiliate marketing standpoint. These features are strengthened by an easy to navigate admin dashboard and by eliminating more complicated back-end layouts that make other affiliate theme options a little too overwhelming. If you’re looking for basic functionality then Affiliate Board can get the job done.

● The Affiliate Board theme has three landing page options that are designed specifically to offer you options when it comes to funneling visitors of your site through your affiliate links to make their purchases. One of them is a traditional “squeeze page” layout which helps keep readers focused on what you want them to do – Click the “Buy” button!

● Affiliate Board is also responsive. This means that it will allow users to access the theme from desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices without having to implement tweaks and plug-ins to create a mobile compatible site. Simply put, access across all devices could mean more clicks and more sales for the products you are promoting.

● Affiliate Board is built on HTML 5 and CSS 3. Simply put this means that the coding of this theme means that you will be faced with fewer compatibility concerns with your site in the foreseeable future because the theme was coded with the latest in coding. Website visitors hate nothing more than visiting a website that is not functioning correctly due to an update, so this is always something you should consider.

● An easy access admin panel allows you to easily integrate Feedburner, Google Adsense, GoSquared and Google Analytics in one simple step to increase your social network exposure and grow your social network followers. These things all allow you to create a stronger social network presence to gain more brand awareness and increase loyal followers.

Pro’s of the Affiliate Board Theme

● A email opt-in form is built right into the theme. While it’s a bit old-school in that it doesn’t hook up to an autoresponder, having it built in takes the initial headaches of integration out of the equation. You’ll probably want to integrate some sort of autoresponder eventually, but this out-of-the-box feature lets you get started quick – and believe me, collecting emails is something you should be doing in order to build your business.

● The Customer testimonials feature that has been built straight in to the theme, makes it easy to show off customer satisfaction in a pre-formatted section on the homepage. Nothing sells your business better than word of mouth!

● Affiliate Board offers short code capability which allows you to easily add interactive and pre-formatted elements in to your pages with the click of a button. This is particularly useful for those looking to add multiple columns, content sections, highlighted text boxes, and buttons. Creating a visually appealing website is crucial to gain and maintain visitors to your site and short code helps to do this.

Affiliate Board Menu

● Social networking is integrated directly in to the Affiliate Board theme; however, this is becoming increasingly common among most themes so it should not be considered a major factor when deciding upon this theme. What this does mean, however, is that you no longer have to rely on plug-in social networking elements that are frequently outdated and not formatted for your website layout! We discussed above how important social networking is to increasing your brand awareness.

● The most appealing “pro” of the Affiliate Board theme is the fact that it is simple to navigate and a visually clean theme, this is made possible by a culmination of the above mentioned elements. Due to this simplicity the Affiliate Board theme is a great option for newcomers to WordPress who are looking to set up a simple to manage website offering affiliate products or services. Additionally, this simplicity makes setting up an affiliate based site quick and easy for WordPress veterans too! Why is simple important? If you spend less time setting up your site, once again, you have more time to focus on your marketing efforts.

Con’s of the Affiliate Board Theme

● The Affiliate Board theme is a little more expensive than some ($79) but if you are looking for a comprehensive yet simple affiliate theme however, this is a theme worth buying and the expense can be recovered with just a few sales.

● The Affiliate Board theme does not incorporate the star rating system which can improve sales by offering first hand rating feedback in testimonial type setups. Fortunately, this issue can be resolved quickly and simply by incorporating the GD Star Rating plug-in which is easy to implement and simple to customize.

● Affiliate Board lacks the typical “Testimonial” section that is present in many of the competing themes in this niche. Fortunately, there are a number of plug-ins that can remedy this depending upon your desired layout format. Testimonials by Aihrus is one commonly utilized option. My favorite option however, is Testimonial Rotator which adds a more professional appearance to the added Testimonial section of your affiliate site.

● This theme doesn’t include any sort of “pretty links” or “link cloaking” functionality or tracking of affiliate stats. I would probably recommend Pretty Links Pro and Yoast’s Google Analytics Plugin to add these features.

Recommendation

While the Affiliate Board theme is just one of many WordPress themes designed specifically for affiliate based sales, it is one of the best for simple and fast site construction. The elements where the site falls short of the competition (rating systems and testimonials) are easily remedied with some pretty spectacular plug-ins that, quite frankly, provide better layout and styling options anyway.

If you are seeking an affiliate marketing theme that is easy to understand, easily customized and fast to set up then Affiliate Board is a good option. With this theme you have endless possibilities for affiliate promotion. Affiliate Board is perfect for promoting hosting services, selling your favorite affiliate eBooks, offering solution based affiliate products, or basically incorporating any ClickBank based product you can imagine!

If Affiliate Board doesn’t quite meet all of your needs when it comes to more unique layout desires or the possibility to create a more “storefront” themed site, I have a few suggestions for you. I like the Smart Reviewer theme for sites going for a less formal review site. Smart Reviewer takes on a Pinterest type format and is likely to make your visitors feel less like they’re entertaining a door to door salesman through their computer screen. Smart Reviewer is only $49. If you’re selling digital products and want a more storefront type of appearance, then my favored theme is Bookstore, WITHOUT A DOUBT – This one sells for only $55.

And, if neither of those don’t quite fit what you’re looking for, you can check out the rest of the Affiliate based WordPress themes here.

In short, if you are looking for a short and sweet theme setup to get your feet wet with affiliate marketing, Affiliate Board will work well.

Click here to check it out!

Udemy WordPress Clone – Academy

Academy Theme

If you’re not sure how Academy could work for you, I recommend that you pay a visit to Udemy.com and take a look at a similar site layout in action. Academy features a very similar layout to Udemy, in fact below I will discuss the similarities and differences between Academy and the Udemy website.

Are you looking to set up an online learning annex? There is, most definitely (and to steal a phrase from Apple), a theme for that. Today we’re going to take a look at the Academy theme from Themeforest, one of the most popular themes for creating membership driven educational forums online.

I admit that when I first looked over the Academy theme I thought “great, but I’m not looking to set up college classes online.” The more I look in to this theme however, the more I realize that it’s actually quite versatile in terms of what it can offer. Whether you are looking to set up a community that offers a variety of online courses for general education or whether you are looking to profit from your own specialized knowledge by setting up an online educational course, this is a pretty decent theme to turn to.

The Academy theme will set you back $55 for a regular license from Themeforest but in terms of the features it has to offer, I’d recommend it as a time saving solution for this type of theme set up. Sure, if you really want to spend the time you can cater your own theme to this type of set up, installing a membership plug-in, creating a number of templates and installing various plug-ins to provide “courses,” “lessons,” and “quiz” options…but I don’t recommend it. Even the most avid WordPress fan will benefit from avoiding the aggravation of setting an Academy type theme up themselves…and think about it, is all that time REALLY worth $55? Just spend the money and get the theme, you won’t regret it.

I will disclose that to date, I have never had a need (or desire) to set up my own paid educational type WordPress site, but after exploring this theme I have a few ideas that I can’t wait to set in to motion.

So, down to the nitty gritty…what do you need to know about this theme?

Academy Theme Features

The Academy theme has a number of features that, when they come together, make for a rather comprehensive theme.

● Academy doesn’t just set you up to “sell” knowledge like a product, but it provides a fully structured selling format that integrates a learning management system.

● Academy features a user profile set up that allows for users to track their educational progress; however, it ensures that this feature is separated from the admin area.

● Academy is a fully responsive theme – a MUST for any WordPress user these days.

● Built in contact forms mean no more outdated contact form plug-ins that can be frustrating to set up and quickly become “unsupported” by newer WordPress versions.

● Academy features a built in slider feature that can be disabled but does not rely upon an external plug-in for the slider feature.

Pro’s of the Academy Theme

Academy Courses Academy Lessons

● Setting up courses, lessons and even quizzes for users is as simple as navigating a pre-set menu in the admin dashboard. There is no setting up plug-ins or editing templates to do which is a huge time saver.

Academy Theme Options

● Making general changes to the Academy theme (such as changing font color, adding a contact form, formatting sidebars, adding a header etc.) are all easily and quickly edited via the theme options panel in the admin dashboard menu. This is a far cry from the first generation WordPress themes that forced you to scour stylesheets!

● WooCommerce is swiftly integrated in to the theme so managing payments is a snap.

● Academy offers a shortcodes editor (if you’re not familiar with shortcodes, get familiar with them, they’re a lifesaver!)

● Academy features subscription offers that provide limited access to lessons and courses for a designated period of time.

● The Academy theme is translation ready which is a particularly useful feature for educational themes like this one.

● Academy theme creator Themex offers quite prompt theme support through the Themeforest system and frequently offers to assist in problem solving for users experiencing theme issues.

● As long as updates are made to the Academy theme, purchasers receive them for FREE.

Con’s of the Academy Theme

Academy Menu

● Academy is a rather feature heavy theme and may not be conducive to a WordPress beginner’s success. If you are a WordPress beginner, this is the best theme available for its purpose, but I recommend seeking assistance in implementing it. If, however, you are moderately versed with WordPress themes, you should have no problem following the included documentation that comes with the theme purchase.

● A few small “nitpicky” details such as non-customization of the registration form, students cannot upload files etc.

How Does Academy Compare to Udemy’s Website?

If you are looking for a Udemy clone via the WordPress platform them Academy is as close as you’re going to get. The general layout of both sites is the same and simple functions such as “lesson search” that are present on Udemy and not on the Academy demo site, can be implemented quickly and simply. Academy also offers a more dynamic approach to the learning annex format by featuring a slideshow on the front page, designed to maintain dynamic content and attract consumers.

While the smaller layout format is slightly different between the two websites, the major functions are still present on both – take for example pricing information, students in each course and rating information. In fact, I find this information to be more visually appealing on the Academy layout rather than the more sterile formatted Udemy site.

If you are looking to recreate the Udemy website by yourself then the Academy WordPress theme is certainly a good place to start. If you’re looking for an exact clone of the Udemy website then you may find you’ll need to do a little tinkering but in my humble opinion, the small differences between the two sites are actually improved on the Academy theme.

Recommendation

So, when it all comes down to it, is the Academy WordPress theme worth your money? Yes, a million times yes. Coming from someone who has spent countless hours customizing themes to offer similar features before Academy was available, I recommend that you stop looking for free replacements or knockoffs for this theme option and just bite the bullet. The simplicity of the features of Academy combined with the streamlined integration of multiple “add on” features not only saves you time in installation and set up, but it also saves you time in the long run since it avoids outdated plug-ins and non-compatibility issues.

Academy is the ultimate resource for your needs if you are looking to create a clean, easily managed online learning system that relies upon WooCommerce for easy payment integration.

Click here to check it out!