Blogside Theme Review

General design

As you see the demo, Blogside's design like a magazine hanging on a brick wall, which is also the fixed style. Every element is created and combined adequately, so the appearance is fine for a blog theme, not so outstanding. I think that it looks somewhat "modest".

Other elements

Besides the grey brick wall and white magazine, blue is another part of the color palette. This palette creates a comfortable reading experience and a cool, classic appearance.

The family font Raleway is the only default font. It's readable, but it has thin lines so, in the long post, I personally find it quite difficult to read.

The most interesting factor of the design is the brick background. Of course, you can change it if you don't like this style. Yet I still suppose that it makes Blogside so different and creative.

A header image is usually a good choice to embellish a page. But with this blog theme, I don't think that's a wise idea. When I set up a header image, it covers all the title and tagline. Plus, I find that no space between the header image and the body page makes this area look quite cramped.

Header image

The sidebar is embellished by cute small icons to help readers feel less boring.

The icons in the sidebar

The first screen area is very interesting. The sticky menu, featured contents and profile image are the three extraordinary features of this WordPress blog theme. The featured contents are shown in a carousel with thumbnails, which coincident with the "modest" design of the theme.

The first screen area

Responsive

This theme is fully responsive in all viewports. That's why it looks good on desktop, tablet or mobile phone.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

This free WordPress blog theme can be used immediately right after you activate it without any enclosed plugin. If you want your website to be similar to the demo, it's simple. When you have a full-content website, you just need to create a sidebar, set up menu, social media, and some minor things.

Blogside isn't compatible with the One-click demo import so you are not able to import all the demo data.

Besides the standard features for a blog theme, there are some extra ones to make your web more intriguing. To have Social Sharing, Thumbnail Image upscale and Post Format Meta Boxes, the author suggests that you should use Alx Extensions plugin.

Blogside allows you to customize many aspects by using Customizer. Especially, when you install Alx Extensions plugin in the recommended plugins tag, you will have a Theme Extensions option with more choices.

Theme Extensions

All the new options in this extension are easy to edit.

Theme Extensions options

In the Theme Options, there are many interesting things that can change your website considerably. For example, the layout can be changed in different types of page. But it just let you change the position of the sidebar.

Customizing layout

The structure of the archive page can be modified. There are multiple choices for it and they can be rendered properly. After trying all the structure, I advise you not to choose the Standard one because it will display your post with the full content.

Customizing blog

Also in this section, you are able to change the Featured content area. Although you are just allowed to choose only one page for this area, there are up to 12 posts for this section. That number is quite generous for you to show all the important posts here, right?

The social links, although I carefully edit all the track in the right way and enable the Social Links in Footer section, don't appear in the footer or anywhere.

Customizing social links

As for the basic elements like color and background image, you can manage it easily.

The brick wall will be replaced if you upload an image as the background.

Customizing background

On the other hand, the background color isn't applied properly. I choose green but it's still a brick wall.

Customizing color

It takes a layman like me about one day to get used to the Edit Post and all the common post formats. There are my most frequently used ones:

The gallery displays your image, which may have different sizes, very orderly and nicely.

Review the gallery of Blogside free theme

The video is inserted that way.

Review the video display of Blogside free theme

This is the center-aligned single image.

Review the image display inside post of Blogside free theme

After using some tools, I found that this blog theme is totally ready for SEO.

Regarding the speed, I used PageSpeed Insights, a popular tool to check speed. It indicated that the speed is medium, quite acceptable.

Review the speed of Blogside free theme

There is general documentation for all the theme of Alx Themes. There are specific and understandable instructions for every aspect of using a theme. But It lacks illustration to make it clearer for a beginner like me.

I couldn't find the support forum for Blogside in the theme homepage. But in the WordPress support forum, you can receive the very quick and good answers from the theme author.