Clean Blocks Theme Review

General design

As the name “Clean Blocks” describe, I guess that you can immediately recognize the clean and straightforward design. This theme shows up mainly with straight lines and box, except the curve lines in some special parts to make differences. Some unnecessary details like border, frame or line are abridged to give a straight impression on the content.

For the readable purpose, it has the full-witch page, grid structure. These elements give this theme the elegant look and simple but effective style. So I suppose that a minimalist may find this theme a favorite one.

Other elements

Default colors are black and light grey text, white background, light purple in some highlight parts and when hovering. So, it enhances the coolness of the design.

It has 2 default types: Open San font for heading and some elements, Lora font for the content post. I really enjoy these fonts as it is clean and legible. Especially, the Lora font can comfort my eyes in a long post.

The header appears with unchangeable style. There is only 1 default type with a neat arrangement. So I see that is well organized enough for this theme’s spirit.

The full-width header slider is a powerful way to convey the spirit of your website. There is a white box containing the title and excerpt of your most prominent posts. By this way, you can effectively attract your visitors and encourage them to read more.

Moving to the bottom of the website, you will see the footer columns and a social icons line. They all lie on the white background so I think that they look no distinctive. The social menu with faded icons will appear clearly when you hover. This design leaves an airy space without messing the footer area, but still, let the icons appear prominently when needed.

This theme has a homepage designed for boosting your business sharply. The Hero content, Feature content, Portfolio, Testimonial, Blog and Service are shown in different ways like the grid structure, slider style, with or without excerpts. Moreover, they are all enclosed with featured images so they are very attractive and diverse.

For example, the Portfolio is so amazing and stunning with featured image only.

While the Blog has both excerpts and featured images to help the readers know what your website has.

One special feature of this theme is full-width hero content. It allows you to show your only one prominent page with a large feature post image on the right. This is a powerful way to emphasize and attract people to your most important page.

Responsive

The theme's design is still okay on different devices: PC, laptop, tablet, mobile. You can see responsive design test using the ami.responsivedesign.is website:

However, I've found a mistake when using the high-resolution screen 1920x1080. The hero content will partially cover the header title like this.

 

 

 

This theme doesn’t have one-click import so if you have a new and blank website, it will not look like the theme demo after you install. You have to set up your website in a traditional way. In general, I find it's not so difficult to set up your website to have the same look with the demo at all.

The author recommends many plugins but you just need Essential content types plugin to have these options like the demo: Portfolio, Feature Content, Service and Testimonial.

As a free minimal WordPress theme, feature-rich and colorful appearance is not an aspect of Clean Blocks. All the custom elements can be changed in the Customizer easily. But the Portfolio, Service, and Testimonial are only created in the Dashboard. After creating them, you can customize their style in the Customizer.

There is an unlimited number of posts to show for Feature content, Portfolio, Testimonial, and Service while the number of Feature content is limited to 20 posts. I believe that these numbers are abundant for you to show off your business and website’s identity. Feature content, Portfolio, and Service have the grid structure and 3 default columns. You should choose 3, 6, or 9...items unless it will leave a blank space on the right side, looking so empty like this:

As for the Testimonial, it is displayed in slider style to save the space for other areas. There are 20 words limited so you should be careful to choose the brief one. Besides, all these parts can be shown on the homepage only or the entire website to remind and draw the visitor’s attention.

There is no choice for changing the color except the header text.

The font is unmodifiable, either. But I suppose that the default font is suitable for this theme. It doesn’t support font from popular fonts like Font Awesome and ICO. So I cannot add any icons to make my website more creative.

Along with the full-width header slider, it supports an attractive full-screen header video and a full-width static header image. I promise that the video will make the website extremely lively and impressive.

Another feature that I’m really interested in is the full-screen slider. You can choose to display or hide it. There is only 1 style for the slider and a flexible number of the slider can be shown. But it just allows you to select the pages for sliders. One more note is that this theme will automatically display the original size of the feature image, so you should choose the similar size of feature images for every page. Otherwise, they will have different sizes for each slide like this.

The footer columns and a social icon line are optional for you to show or not. The maximum number of the column is 3, just adequate for you to display all the basic necessary widget. As for social media, you just need to insert your URL and the equivalent icon will appear. Hence, you're free to use the social networking site to connect with your readers.

As an amateur, it just takes 1 day for me to be familiar with the theme and I didn’t see any difficulty in editing my posts.

On every single post, featured image stretching out with zoom-in effect making your post less boring.

View post on imgur.com

A single image and video are displayed at a full-width size, easy for you to watch.

The quote appears with bigger size and same font type with text, so it has not much difference and uniqueness.

The gallery has a good way to display your images. Even when they have dissimilar size, the gallery still look fine like this:

 

I used some tools to check the SEO configuration, it shows that this Free WordPress theme is already optimized for SEO.

After using PageSpeed Insight tools to check the speed, the result indicates that this theme has the upper medium speed. The speed is medium but I still consider an acceptable performance for a Free WordPress theme.

Almost every instruction links to the Frequently Asked Question. Don’t worry if you are the beginner because users are guided step by step with detailed and understandable instruction. It even has the tutorial in the form of video to help you learn the instruction quickly.

There are 3 methods to receive support. The support ticket system is only for those who buy a membership. If you want free support, you can use F.Q.A (frequently asked questions) with detailed answers from the author and support forum with answers by the user themselves.
In Wordpress.com, I see any reply from the author so I guess that they don’t support here.