Career Portfolio Theme Review

General Design

Career Portfolio free version provides you 3 pre-made demos following creative and robust style. Every element is emphasized in different ways: by strong color, big and bold typography, and by sharp and thick lines and shape.

Review the small elements in the design

Moreover, the layout of this free portfolio theme is quite unique. Even the layout and style of different elements are dissimilar and distinctive. That's why Career Portfolio is made for creative users.

Other Elements

Color and Font

Using orange and blue tones, Career Portfolio refects a robust and dynamic style. The Oswald and Roboto Condensed fonts are strong, readable, and really match with the theme's spirit.

Header and Menu

The most engaging element of this free portfolio theme for me is the sticky slide-out sidebar menu. It's just a normal slide-out menu, but if you notice, the mouse after you slide the menu out will become the "close" button. It's not only convenient to close the menu anywhere, but also make this theme so striking.

Review the slide-out sidebar menu

Interestingly, you're given the other 2 menu styles. Like this one, well, it's quite boring to me.

Review the horizontal menu

Or this one (normal menu) will look better, at least, normal and popular.

Review the normal menu

Notably, you can display a static image or video in the header and it can show up on every page or just some specific page you want. I prefer displaying it on important pages like the front page and archive page because it helps these pages more beautiful. But don't overuse it because it may overwhelm other elements.

Header media of this theme

Front Page and Other Inner Pages

As you can see, Career Portfolio has a stunning front page to showcase yourself. From header to footer, all elements are intuitive, extensive, and prominent. You can redesign it using Elementor if you want. But if I were you, I wouldn't change this unique and beautiful page.

I just figured out that this free portfolio theme has one default style for archive pages. It's fine for me. I just don't like that postdate style as they look quite unbalanced so I think you should enable it. Besides, you can change, I think you should change the page pagination to this numeric style. It's better and more popular.

The post date on the archive page

Finally, single post pages and sidebar are airy, clean, and spacious. They get along well when appearing in the same place.

Single post page

Responsive

I tried using this free portfolio theme on different devices. It can show the ability to display beautifully anywhere and on any screen size.

After installing this free portfolio theme, your website doesn't look like the demo immediately so you have to set up the homepage carefully.

Homepage after activating Career Portfolio without setting up

If you choose to manually resemble the demo, it's not really simple at all. You need to use Elementor page builder or using Customizer with a lot of options, choose the homepage template, and follow the style of the demo.

So I think to save time, you can make use of the one-click demo import feature. It's simple, quick, and literally requires you "one click" to get things done. Especially, you can choose one out of these 3 demos for your site. That's such a great thing about this theme.

one-click demo import with 3 pre-made demos

Moreover, it's optional to import a complete demo or just a part of the demo. So convenient, right! I love that because not many other free WordPress themes can do that, and I love the fact that all demos can be imported properly.

The options when importing demo

Career Portfolio is a feature-rich theme. It supports almost every basic and advanced features that you need for a personal-branding theme. From service, portfolio, testimonial feature to Elementor compatibility, one-click demo import, video background, ... you will have a fully-functional and outstanding website.

Using Elementor

The first way of customization is by using the Elementor page builder. There are just common modules for Elementor without special ones from Career Portfolio. I tested some of the modules and they all display well.

Using Elementor to customize

Using Customizer

The second way is using Live Customizer. Although there are many features to work with, it's quite easy to use.

General Use

These checkboxes will help you quickly enable/disable elements. But you will have to notice the live preview carefully because the changes may be very minor. For example, I can change the header layout and show/hide some features of it in a rapid way using these checkboxes properly.

Review the general use of Customizer

Or changing the page color is also simple. You can choose any color and they will be applied correctly. However, there are only 2 color sections so you can't repaint your site as much you want. Besides, I see no change in the header text color.

Review the color customization

Front Page

The most special thing about this theme's customization is that even when you don't use Elementor, you can still create and customize a home page like the demo using Front Page Options in Customizer.

There are a lot of things to deal with, and you need to disable the Home Page Content first. But why? It took me about 10 minutes to completely know the reason so I think the author should clarify it with some instructions right in this panel.

When you disable the Home Page Content, the content created by Elementor page builder will disappear.

All the options are shorted and ordered logically. They are arranged in the exact order that they're displayed on the homepage. Therefore, I bet that you will have no difficulty in dealing with them.

Front Page Options with a lot of features

Notably, you are allowed to control the display of each section quickly and conveniently by enable/disable checkbox. And then, other steps are understandable and you will have proper changes after each customization.

Some Drawback

Still, there are limitations to display some characteristics. For example, this Qualification restricts you to display only 2 kinds of qualification, 6 items for each kind, and only random posts from the chosen category. Therefore, you can't show anything you want, especially, if you use this free portfolio theme as a CV.

Some drawback in customization

I found one mistake with the embedded video. When I chose center alignment, it was still on the left.

Review the video display

Other media looks still good.

Review the gallery display

The blockquote looks not different from normal text, but there is not mistake with it.

Review the blockquote display

After verifying SEO by some methods, I found that Career Portfolio hasn't totally optimized for SEO yet. There is also no recommended SEO plugin so you should find an SEO plugin yourself.

I checked the speed by Google PageSpeed Insights and the result was okay.

Theme's speed check by Google PageSpeed Insights

The detailed documentation will help you walk  through everything you need when dealing with this free portfolio theme. Especially, the sticky sidebar menu can navigate you to any section in the blink of an eye.

The support forum of Theme404 welcomes every use, even free users. You just need to sign up for free and create a topic, the supporter will come and help you quickly with helpful answer and kind manner.

But in WordPress support forum, I see that the recent questions (about 4 weeks ago) from users are not replied by the support team.