Ashe Theme Review

General design

The cool color, use of thin straight lines and spacious design make Ashe a typically elegant and class blog. For women and girls who love this gentle and charming style, Ashe is an ideal choice.

Other elements

Orienting to classic and decent style, light grey color is the dominant tone. Some parts are highlighted by brown, also a neutral color, thus making the whole theme both cool and deep.

Open-san and Playfair Display is a perfect combination. One font is readable for the content, another is a bit more artistic and appealing for the heading. Moreover, there are 2 more typefaces for the title and menu bar: Kalam and Rokkit. I prefer Kalam because it's girly, suitable for a feminine blog theme. In the meanwhile, Rokkit is too strong and hard.

The first screen area is prominent with the full-width header image really eye-calming with well-organized text elements. Scrolling down, it's more attractive with slider and featured links section. In the demo, you can see that these sections have box style, looking symmetrical with the whole page content. You can change the style of these sections to full-width. For example, to write this review for Ashe, I tried the box style for the header image and the full-width style for the other elements (including the page content). It looks not bad, but the default style is still the best, isn't it?

You can change the layout by adding or hiding the sidebar. It's sticky sidebars, but you can unstick it, and even stretch or narrow down the sidebar's width depending on your preference. Yet I recommend not to use both sidebars because the space for content is so narrower and it looks "crowded".

Besides the default style of the archive page, there is another list style. If you switch to this style, your post's featured images are shown with the original size. And without the related post section, the whole layout is much airier.

The single post page and other inner pages keep the classic, decent and airy appearance so I'm sure that you will feel so relaxed with this feminine blog theme.

Responsive

I'm very satisfied with the design of this free WordPress feminine blog theme on different devices. Notably, the full-width header image is so stunning and beautiful in even mobile devices.

After activating, this free WordPress feminine blog is ready to use. I have a blank website and this is how it looks right after I activated Ashe:

It's already quite pretty with the full-width header image and sidebar from the demo, right? But you should definitely have content for your website and set up it to have a complete website in use. There are two ways: using an instant demo import and manual setup.

Because our website is blank and I'm lazy to manually set it up, I run the importer following the guide from the author. However, I don't know why the demo file failed to be uploaded.

Hence, I switch to set up it by hand and see it's not difficult. You just need to use Customizer with some simple steps.

Ashe itself supports useful features for a blog like Social Sharing, Social Linking, Related Post, ... and even suggest many plugins to have advanced features like Instagram post and feed.

Interestingly, I found out that you are allowed to use the page builder to custom this theme. With Elementor page builder compatibility and the basic modules includes, it's like nothing can prevent you from designing your website in the simplest way. There are a lot of customization tools in Customizer. They're powerful and simple to manage.

First, you are given unlimited color to paint your theme in each color section, but you just have 4 color sections here. All of them can be changed properly and easily (the header background can just be seen if you change the full-width header image to box style.

Featured Slider and Featured Links can be utilized and customized after you check the boxes on each section to enable them. For both of them, you can choose places to display. The Slider section allows you to choose items from available posts or custom images and links, so it's more convenient for you to select items here. However, free Ashe just limits the number of slides to 5. Still adequate to use for me, how about you?

In the meanwhile, the number of Featured Links is limited to three items, which is somewhat restricted if you want to show off more things here. To have more power for Featured Links and Slider sections, you have to buy the pro version.

It's quick and easy to enable/disable social sharing icons and related posts. Furthermore, you have up to 7  social site icons, which are all popular sites. Thanks to them, my visitors can share any post to many different sites. I love this!

As for the social linking icons, you only have 4 default icons. That's a small number, I think. When you enter the proper link, they will show up in the top bar.

There are still many interesting things, which mostly are some minor things to help you carefully style your blog.

For daily use, you will need to work with the Gutenberg editor. To create top qualified and interesting content, you absolutely need the blocks (standard blocks) from the Gutenberg editor.

I tested the most frequently used blocks and see that they all displayed nicely. Like this gallery, although the images inside it have different size and style, it still scale to fit with the whole frame.

And the full-width video is clear and large to watch without zooming in.

SEO hasn't been effectively ready to use yet. I checked it by some tools online and see it needs improving.

Speed seems not to be the strength of this free WordPress feminine theme. I tested it by Google PageSpeed Insights and here is the result.

The documentation is written for Ashe Pro only but it still contains some common sections that you can apply for free Ashe.

Besides, there are some video tutorials for each specific section like importing demo content, customizing featured slider, ... which makes it more effective and understandable.

Ashe free support forum welcomes free users from everywhere to ask and answer questions. You can enter keywords to search for your needed topic here. Plus, the supporter is kind and very fast to help users solve their problems. But don't go to Ashe pro forum, it's just for those who buy the pro version. You can even see Ashe team supports in the WordPress support forum.