Excellent Theme Review

General Design

Excellent has 5 demos for different purposes, and of course, they are not similar, but they still have the same spirit. If you walk through all the demos, you will see that the designs are really "cold" and spacious. Besides, all elements are really "slim", "small", also a bit minimalistic.

I think that this kind of design is not for those who love the fancy and lively style because sometimes it may be too "quiet".

Other Elements

Color and Font

You can see that all 5 demos have light grey as the main tone, which makes them so cool and quiet. There are some elements highlighted with red, green, ... and they can be recolored, but I think these highlights are not enough to make the differences.

The author uses the artistic family fonts for headings and simple fonts for body texts. I like this idea because the headings help the general design less "quite" and simple.

The Layout

There are multiple layouts for the whole page and they all look pretty.

This is the box layout of an online CV demo, making everything like a real CV. You can also use it for any other kinds of website as well as it's suitable.

Excellent CV design

And this is the full-width one that gives your website more space.

Excellent Shop demo

In my personal opinion, I love the box style. Why? Because the design is already so spacious, the full-width layout can make everything smaller compared to the extensive layout.

Archive Page

There are two styles for the archive page: grid and list. All look good and has its own advantage.

Review the archive page with list style

Review the archive page with grid style

Header and Footer

How about the header and footer layout? If you take a close look at all the demo, you can see that they have 3 styles for the header and one four-column style for the footer. Although there are many components for the header and footer, they are still well-arranged and don't mess up with each other at all. And if you don't want many things to show up here, you can hide each of them.

Review the footer

Review the header

Other Minor Elements

These icons and decorations prove that the author of this free multipurpose theme is so meticulous. I believe that Excellent theme becomes more sophisticate and delicate thanks to these beautiful things.

Review the minor things in design

Responsive

Excellent theme can display nicely on all kinds of device and screen without any mistake. You can try this theme on different devices yourself or test the responsive design by some online tools.

Responsive design

You need to set up your website and add necessary data to have a desired site like one of the demos. Otherwise, it will look different from what you thought like this:

My website right after installing Excellent theme

So, how to make it happen? You have two choices: set up your website by hand or use one-click demo import feature.

If you want to instantly import demo, it will be very easy and quick. My site after importing is perfect without any mistake. You just need to select one among 5 demos to import and wait a moment.

Select the demos

However, it requires you to download and install the Theme Freesia Demo Import plugin, which is not available in wordpress.org. So, it's a bit inconvenient from my view.

Besides, with each demo, you have to install recommended plugins to make your site resemble exactly the demo and set up special components like slider.

Excellent free multipurpose themes supports many features to adapt different purposes. Therefore, you don't need to install extra plugins to have all necessary things like feature slider, social linking.

This theme is even support one-click demo import and WooCommerce.

The Advantages

Using Customizer tool, you can customize almost everything easily.

The author divided and sorted the options into different panels in a reasonable way. That help users, even a layman like me find the desired options easily.

For example, all basic settings lie in one panel like this:

All basic settings lie in one panel

While special settings from Excellent theme are in this panel:

Special settings from Excellent theme are in this panel:

Besides, it's easy to deal with each option. You just need to choose an option in drop-down menus or fill in the needed information.

It's easy to deal with each option

Some Disadvantages

I find that Excellent theme still has some limitation.

You are just able to choose a category for slider. So, it's impossible if you want to show your custom posts, pages, or links. Besides, you can't even decide the number of slide.

Review the slider settings

Secondly, there are only 3 slots for Featured Images section. This number is enough for me, but I think Excellent should gives more slots to make it more "excellent".

there are only 3 slots for Featured Images section

In daily basis, Excellent provides you with all standard post formats from Gutenberg. They work well, display nicely, and have no mistake at all.

For example, these block quotes show up beautifully.

Review the block quote

And the gallery is well-organized:

Review the gallery

Speed is not the strength of this free multipurpose theme. I tested it with Google PageSpeed Insights and here is the result: 67/100 on computers.

Theme's speed checked by Google PageSpeed Insights

I used special tools to verify SEO optimization. Luckily, Excellent is already SEO-friendly.

The documentation is quite in-depth and understandable. It even includes a sidebar menu so you can easily and quickly jump to the needed section.

You can use support ticket in free support forum. But you have to register an account first, which is very easy and fast. The plus support forum is for premium user only, so you shouldn't mistake between these forums.