BlogBell Theme Review

General design

The appearance is graceful, slimline and bright. One of the contributing factor of this appearance is the slim lines: the thin straight lines and dotted lines are frequently used very reasonably decorate this theme. They are perfectly well-balanced and help to catch the reader's eyes.

The lines used in the design

Other elements

The author uses Bad-script, a handwriting family font for the heading and Muli for the body content. That's such a wise combination because Muli is readable and straightforward meanwhile Bad-script is creative and beautiful. Hence, they dramatically make this theme so smooth, delightful and graceful.

The main color like light grey, black, white and blue are the neutral color. They give me a sense of friendliness and comfort and help to highlight the beautiful images.

The front page displays all the elements in a sleek, neat and prominent way. From the full-width slider to the masonry content are all look so good. I find nothing to complain about it.

The header area of the single post page impresses me by its full-screen featured image. The title of the post lies directly on the image in order to catch the reader's attention and save the space. I also love the overlay as it avoids messing the text with the image behind it.

Featured image of the single post

The archive page has a two-column masonry structure. But if you hide the sidebar, there will be three columns instead. As for the other inner page, you can also hide the sidebar to make people focus on the body more.

Responsive

BlogBell can adapt to any viewports or device thanks to its responsive design. It looks gorgeous in laptop, tablet or smartphone without any problem. Particularly, the featured sliders are still so beautiful in all devices.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

After being activated, this theme can be in use right away without any extra steps or enclosed plugin. But it requires some more steps to make your website look like the demo as there is no One-click demo import compatibility. There are some special parts that you need to create: Featured Posts, Featured Slider, About and Blog sections. They all can be customized easily in the Customizer.

Besides the basic features for a WordPress blog theme, there are many interesting ones like Slider, Featured Content. But it lacks some popular ones like Social Sharing, Social Linking, and Related Post. You have to find plugins by yourself to have them because there is no recommended plugin from the author.

Customization is not a difficult task. You just have to work with the Customizer and easily edit many custom features here.

First, you should pay attention to the front page sections. The author has created favorable conditions for even a beginner to customize them properly.

There are only 4 items and only the pages can be chosen to display in the slider. I think that number is adequate to use, but I wish to display more kinds of items, for example, post or arbitrary image.

Customizing the slider

Similarly, you only have pages to show in the About section. And I think three items are the pretty reasonable number for this section.

Customizing About section

If your page doesn't have a featured image, then the header image will be shown instead. You can choose any picture and crop it to any size you want.

Customizing header image

There are only 2 color sections and they will change the whole appearance of this theme dramatically.

Customizing color

There are many standard post formats that are helpful for your post. They look good and easy to use.

For example, here is how Twitter embeds.

This is a gallery where your images are shown very beautifully.

And the full-screen single image is so overwhelming, right?

If you choose the full-width layout for video, the frame will be stretched out to be full-width with the unchanged height. So in fact, your video still looks the same as its default frame.

Full-width Video

I checked the SEO optimization by some tools. It's good to know that this WordPress blog is fully optimized for SEO.

The speed is not so good, but it's passable with medium score. I used PageSpeed Insight to check the speed as you can see here.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

Documentation Of BlogBell Free is quite short and brief. I think it's good to read the step-by-step instructions here, but it lacks the detailed ones to help non-professional users understand it well.

There is a support forum for BlogBell Free. You just need to register an account and login to receive help from the author. It's quick and always free.