Elara Theme Review

General design

The overall design makes your blog is like a magazine with a white background color, and this magazine is put on a table. As a classical-style theme, the main design is based on the basic straight lines. On the homepage, posts are displayed in rectangle size, full-width page and grid structure, which helps visitors scan and skim easily the content.

Other elements

As for the color, the main elements like Header, Footer, content words are light grey and white, giving the website a sense of elegance.

The font, however, is unchangeable. This theme uses 2 simple fonts: Playfair and Poppins. Playfair font, a classical typeface with a modern feeling giving designs the elegance, is mainly used, while Poppins font is only used in some parts to make the highlight. I think that the Playfair is not suitable for a lengthy post because the words are quite slim which makes me feel like they stick together. I tried to use icons in this theme but it does not support icons from the popular pages like ICO and Font awesome.

 

In the default option of the header, it uses the Poppins font but when you change the widget of the header, Playfair replaces it like this:

 

The default menu on the left of the header even has a mistake as it shows the wrong menu like that. Hence, I prefer the default option, it looks cooler and simpler.

Overall, these factors make the theme a classical one with elegant and cool appearance.

The footer has only 1 layout with 5 columns to display 5 different widgets. But if you set up less than 5 widgets, it will look unbalanced like this.

Because this theme is customized for a rich-media blog, words are minimized in just title and post details are shown in without the preview, which helps you focus more on the photo. Besides, the thumbnail image includes a zoom-in effect to spotlight the photo is an interesting point.

 

Plus, Elara does a good job of setting up the well-aired space between paragraphs and pictures in the post content.

A special and logical thing about this theme is the feature category showing up at the bottom of the front page. It summarizes what you have on your website so you can save time to find the highlight categories.

Responsive

This theme works well in PC, laptop, smartphone, and table. It means that Elera looks beautiful and reasonable in different devices without any problem at all. You can see the design in different devices using ami.responsivedesign.is here:

Elara (free version) is part of the WordPress.org themes repository, so you can search for it in your dashboard and install usually as a free theme.

Yet there is one disadvantage if your website is a new website because it has no 1 click import. After you install the theme the website will not look like the demo and it will be blank.

To manually set up your website look like the demo, it recommends you to install the Kirki plugin to have more options in the customizer. Kirki is easy to install and ready to use, you just need to click the button “begin to install” and “apply” to activate it.

 

 

 

The color is already set as the demo for you, so you need to custom the sidebar, footer, header. The manipulations can be done easily in the Customizer.

You can easily custom the features in Customization. However, the number of custom sections is very limited.

It is an unlimited choice to change the color or image of the table, but you cannot change the word color and the white background color of the magazine I described in the Design.

There are 1 style for the header and 3 positions to set up widgets into the header: left, right, and center. If you do not add the header, the default header will be the page list on the left and the search bar on the right. As I mentioned above, I highly recommend the default header to make the page look nicer.

On the front page, if you want a direct focus on your posts, you can hide the slider totally. Otherwise, you can choose whether to show this part in 2 styles: banner or slider. A click button with the changed-color effect in the banner makes it look quite fancy.

Besides, a slider post can make your page professional. But its limitation is that you have only 1 style, and you can choose only 1 category rather than choosing individual posts to display.

Although I set up the menu with 3 levels, it can not show the 3rd level menu in the menu bar.

The sidebar appears on the right of the page. There are 3 options for the sidebar: below the feature image, next to the feature image or if you don’t want to show, you can hide it.

All the basic widgets you may need are also available in the header, footer, and sidebar.

In the archived page, there are 3 columns to perform the posts like the demo, but if you choose to hide the sidebar post it will have 4 columns. In the single post page, it is optional to show the detailed post like author, date, comment number, category, tag but no excerpt.

Lastly, if you want to change the copyright text, you must know about coding.

Elara theme is quite easy to use if you get used to it in about 1 day. During the trial period, I didn’t see any problem when editing my post. It supplies you with the basic format you may need for a blog.

The grid structure of the gallery displays your images with very neatly even when your single images have different size.

You can even change the number of columns and position of the gallery inside a post.

The video is displayed on a full-width page, which is convenient to enjoy.

 

 

The blockquote appears with far much bigger size, same font type and dropped capital letter but without quotation mark or any other distinctive sign, so it doesn’t look much different.

 

I used PageSpeed Insight to check the theme speed. It shows that the speed need much work to be improved.

Besides, I see that Elara has not been well optimized for SEO yet. You need to install plugins for SEO but the author doesn't recommend any SEO plugin at all. I guess that it may be a challenge for a beginner to find a suitable SEO plugin.

The documentation is brief and easily understandable. Especially you can type some keywords in the search bar like in Google Search to look for your wanted instructions.

 

In the Wordpress.org support forum, the Elara team uses multiple names, for example, Dimlyrathemes, to support users. Plus, if you want more help from the author, you can use the ticket system in the Lyrathemes.com. The reply is quick, and within 1 day you can receive their support email with detail instruction and kindness.