Blog Lover Theme Review

General design

The design is built from straight lines and boxes. The boxes that contain the content are put in a light grey background. The grey background is very helpful to balance with the white color of the boxes. This palette makes the readers feel really comfortable while reading.

The background color

On the homepage, the author really knows how to arrange and mix the different kinds of posts and structures. Both grid and list layout are used and combined with some special elements like a full-screen video or a hero slider. That arrangement makes the whole site more creative and attractive.

Video on the homepage

Other elements

The main colors used here are light grey, black and white. These colors are the popular choice for a blog to increase reading efficiency. They also orient to the classic and decent style but still give the sense of warmness somehow by highlighting some small elements with orange.

Khand and Play-fair Display are the 2 fonts the author uses. Khand font is straightforward and open, suitable for the heading. But I think that the Play-fair Display is not good for a lengthy content of a post. The texts look very slim and kind of stick to each other.

As for other areas like header, sidebar, and footer, I'm very satisfied with the design: simple but effective. The header is open and airy, and all the elements here are really well-organized.

Header

The footer area is put on a different background so it becomes so prominent. The social linking icons are made faded and then appear clearly when hovering. This design helps the footer less glitzy with many details.

Footer

I will give my compliment on the full-screen banner slider, really impressive and stunning. The title and read more button on the slider encourage you to explore more things about this post, such an effective way to show off the prominent posts.

Banner slider

On the archived page, there is no except to make people concentrate on the media display more. But I still think it's necessary to have 2 or 3 lines to let people know what they are going to read. And on the single post page, the full-width featured image is really attractive here. All the information and title of the post lie in the featured image to save the room for the body content.

Responsive

In different devices, this WordPress blog theme has proved to be fully responsive. It means that the design is nice in PC, laptop, tablet or all kinds of smartphones without any problem. You can test the design by ami.responsivedesign.is.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

The work of installing is so easy with the help of one-click demo import. You can have a beautiful website as the theme demo in a few minutes. All you need to do is simple: installing the one-click demo import plugin in the recommended tag and wait for a minute to get everything done.

Otherwise, you can still switch to manual set up. It's also easy to set up the widget area, choosing sliders and create posts...to make your theme as fine as the demo.

The infinite scroll is compatible with Jetpack. To have more feature, you have to upgrade to the Pro version.

If you want your website to have a different appearance from the demo, you can customize it in the Customize. There are quite a lot of features for you to modify easily.

I will start with the homepage section. You can see that the elements in this Customize section are in order with their position on the homepage. So you can quickly recognize the preview change. All these elements can be enabled/disabled and you can choose where you want to render the content from post or page (except the Video section). But with different sections, you will have the different number of posts to show.

For example, you have a limited number of slides to show: 3 posts. Maybe just 3 posts are not enough for a blog lover like me. The choice for the Hero slider and Latest news is similar but I think it's okay with this number as they're not so important as the Banner slider.

Customizing banner slider

The Feature section has more choices for you: up to 7 posts or pages so that you can freely choose your favorite posts/pages here.

Customizing featured

In the video section, you just can choose a post to show. All you need to do is adding a video link, very simple and fast, right?

Customizing video

Moreover, you have some more options in the Advance setting. For example, color and background image. The number of custom colors is not much but still can considerably change the appearance of your website.

Customizing color

Besides, there are many options for the single post page, single page, and archive page. All these sections can be changed quickly without any problem.

Customizing archive/blog

Customizing single post

Customizing single pages

And finally, the author gives you every WordPress blog theme's basic widget to add in footer columns, homepage sidebar, and primary sidebar. The widgets you choose are rendered properly here.

Here I have one last note for you. If you want to have the social menu icons look so good on the top menu and footer area, you have to tick the "Social" in the menu location. It's a benefit for you as you can add any URL and the icon appears immediately. Plus, they don't restrict the number of social linking.

Customizing social linking

Now you see how much you can customize your website, and if you're still not satisfied, you can reset all buy 1 click very fast.

Reset all

In this WordPress Blog theme, you have all the necessary post formats to write diverse kinds of posts. Here are some formats that I tested.

The blockquote shows up quite impressive compared to the normal text. There are 2 styles for it and I love the first style more. But one small detail I don't like much is the vanishing right vertical line of the border.

Blockquote

The video embeds this way.

Video

The way the gallery displays is very neat even when it has different-size images.

Gallery

I checked the SEO configuration by some tools and see that this WordPress blog theme has not been customized for SEO yet. The author doesn't recommend any plugin for this compatibility so you have to find by yourself. I'm so worried about how to find a suitable plugin as I don't know much about the technology. Hence, I hope that the author will add it to help the beginner like me.

As for the speed, it's not one of the strengths of Blog Lover. The speed still needs much work, especially the speed in a mobile device is under medium. You can see the result by the PageSpeed Insights tool here.

Website speed in a computer

Website speed in a mobile device

The documentation has everything you need: from the general setting, recommended plugin, importing demo data, to the specific customization...They wrote the instruction carefully with annotated illustrations and understandable wording.

Like the BlogSlog, there are 2 kinds of support you can receive: and F.Q.A and a support forum. The author answers questions in the support forum here very enthusiastically.