Bold Photography Theme Review

General design

This theme has been specially designed to show the high level of photography websites with its shady and bold look. It has a home page displaying many advanced features like Hero Content, Testimonial, Featured Post Slider, Projects very nicely, giving a professional look. Despite having no button, it still has its own way to highlight the texts to attract readers.

The desiger seems to carefully pay attention to every element, even the minor details. So it looks super delicate and eye-catching.

Other elements

The black-and-white is the classic combination to have a shady design, mystery, and sharp feeling. Moreover, the author really knows how to use the golden minor elements to emphasize the decorative factors, the hyperlink, and other special parts. Hence, the whole appearance can be both harmonious and catchy.

This theme uses Sans font: Josefin Sans, Open Sans, and Oswald. They all look solid, "strong" and readable, which is born to coincide with the whole design of the theme.

Now I will go into the detail on the homepage. Each part of the homepage has different ways to display so it enhances the diversity and creativity of this page.

The full-screen slider can tell many intriguing stories to the reader at first sight. However, this area contains many elements arranged both vertically and horizontally. So personally, I think it looks quite glitzy. But you can choose how to display these elements like enable, disable them. And other than the featured slider, a video or a static image can be chosen. They are both full-screen and as stunning as the slider.

Featured post slider

The Projects area surely delivers the best experience for you with the masonry structure and changing-color effect. The effect changes the monochromatic images into the original colorful images. Therefore, it can be interesting, colorful and fitted with the main spirit of the theme at the same time.

View post on imgur.com

Next, the Testimonials are shown in the form of a slider. The decorative elements like quotation mark and a straight line are used very reasonably to make it extremely distinctive and stunning. All the elements also have the center alignment, and they make this area both neat and airy.

Testimonials

Moving to another page, I see that the archive page with the single-column layout and large featured images so attractive and vivid. It focuses on displaying the image so the excerpt and the meta are brief, give the spotlight to the beautiful featured image. Yet you can still change the number of the excerpt in the Customizer.

The sidebar can be shown in the right or hidden. In the demo, the sidebar appears on every page except the front page and archive page. You can decide whether to show it on each page or not in the Customizer.

The other pages and single post page are very simple. There is no featured image and I even can't customize it so I think it may be a bit boring.

Single post page

Responsive

Besides in a PC or laptop, this theme keeps the nice design even in tablet and smartphone. You can see the responsive design directly in the theme homepage here.

the responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is.

It's very easy to install and ready to use this theme after you activate it. But to have the important features like Portfolio, Testimonial, Services, Featured Contents you have to install Essential Content Types, which is already recommended by the author and easy to install and set up.

This theme doesn't support the one-click demo import so you can't import all the content from the demo. Hence, you have to spend about an hour to manually set up to make your website similar to the demo. It requires a static page as the home page so it may be quite complicated for a beginner. But still, I believe that this theme is quite simple to set up.

For Featured Content, Portfolio, Services, and Testimonial, you have to install Essential Content Types Plugin with Featured Content Type Enabled.

For infinite scrolling, use Catch Infinite Scroll Plugin with Infinite Scroll module Enabled.

The Instagram carousel is compatible with Catch Instagram Feed Gallery & Widget.

The list of custom features includes both basic and advanced sections. Especially, when you have the Essential Content Types in mind, the Featured Contents, Testimonials, Services, and Portfolio are ready to be customized in the Customizer.

Essential Content Types options after having Essential Content Types plugin

Before customizing them, you have to create the posts of each part in the Dashboard. It's very simple, just like the way you create a new normal post.

Creating Portfolio, Testimonials, Featured Content, and Service in the Dashboard

And now, you can select the posts and number of posts for each section easily in the Customizer. They are quite generous to give you up to 20 posts for Featured Contents, Services, and Portfolio, while the number of Testimonials is unlimited. So you can freely add whatever you want here to attract the reader. Along with the enable/disable option, there are options to show these sections on the homepage only or the entire page. Overall, it's quite easy to customize them, except for a small note about the Portfolio and Service sections. There are 3 default columns for these sections so you should choose 3, 6 or 9... posts to make it balanced.

Projects

How about other basic features? For example, the color, menu and widget area (sidebar and 3 footer columns) can be changed properly.

There is only 1 color section so it's impossible if you want to make your page more colorful.

Customizing color

The menu location includes the social menu. By this way, you have the unlimited custom link to add any social link in the header.

Menu locations

The header style and layout can't be changed. To make up for this, the author allows you to choose a static image, header video or slider to display and change the header title alignment.

Customizing header title and header image

You should know that if you display the header image/video and the slider at the same time, the slider will appear under the static image/video. But if you hide the header image/video, the slider will replace the image/video as you see in the demo. The Featured Slider also has up to 20 slides so you don't have to think about the number of pages to show. But you can only choose pages here instead of single posts.

Featured Slider

The last words, there are abundant sections for you to carefully customize your website like the excerpt length, pagination types...that you can easily change. However, the number of styles or layouts for each part is still pretty limited so you have to update to the pro version to have more choice.

Theme Options

With all the necessary formats, you can create any kind of post as you want.

This is how the video embeds.

Video

It has a beautiful gallery displaying images with different sizes very neatly.

Gallery

The blockquote is unique and prominent compared to the normal texts.

Blockquote

This theme hasn't been ready for SEO yet so you have to use a plugin to have it. However, among the suggested plugins, there is no plugin for SEO. It may be difficult for the non-professional user like me to find a suitable plugin.

By using PageSpeed Insights, I receive the result that this free WordPress theme has a so so speed. You can see that the score is medium here.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

I can't find the theme instruction right now. It's said that the page can't be found when I click the instruction link in the Customizer.

The F.A.Q provided you with the most frequent asked questions so you should read it carefully before asking anything.

If you can't find the needed answer in the F.A.Q, the support forum will help you. You need to log in and create a topic in the forum of Free Bold Photography theme. Then, the other users and the key master from the theme company will respond to you sooner or later.