Galway Lite Theme Review

General design

I bet that users will be inspired by the bright, clean and youthful appearance. The style can be full-width like the demo or container. The container style with the box-shadow design is also a good idea for your website.

Container layout

Plus, the design is based one both curved lines and straight lines. Hence, the appearance becomes very flexible and diverse, which suits any kind of user.

Other elements

The pink color for some highlighted elements blows up a "young" and dynamic sense for this theme. Overall, the color palette is the main factor that gives Galway a bright and "happy" breath, just like it can fill your soul with love.

The author is very good at using typefaces. The Source Serif Pro causes an impression on the heading while the Source San Pro eases readers' eyes when reading body content.

Together with the beautiful center-focused slider, the slide-out sidebar and sticky menu is my other favorite part. Their creative smooth movement gives me a sense of " fluency" as well as grab my attention for the first time immediately.

Slide-out sidebar and sticky menu

Listing is the only structure for the archive page but you can diversify this page by changing the image style. The full-size featured images in the demo are prominent. The left or right images may be less attractive but they still look neat and well-fitted with the texts.

Left image on the archive page

Other pages are also prettified with the creative parallax header images. Moreover, I can't help myself from switching from one to the other post to read because they are not only so stunning with the parallax featured image but also very airy and easy to read.

Responsive

Galway Lite can adapt and display well in all handheld devices. The design looks perfect in all viewports so you don't need to worry about using this theme in any device.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

After you install, your website isn't like the demo so you have to spend time setting it up. Luckily, you can set up in flash without any difficulties by using One-click demo import. Otherwise, manual set up is also simple with the help of Customizer. Both actions can be done easily without so many steps so that even a beginner like me can handle everything quickly.

Besides the common features for a WordPress blog, there are Featured Slider, Slide-out Sidebar and Social Linking to make your website stand out in the crowd.

Nonetheless, the author doesn't recommend any plugin to get more features at all.

You don't know how simple it is to customize this WordPress blog until you use it. The Customizer helps you edit all the custom aspects, both basic and some advanced ones.

The color section only allows you to change the background color. But you can choose any color for this area. And if you think the color is not enough to make your page creative, then using a background image will be a good idea.

Customizing color

The typography stays unchanged but I think the default style is good to use without changing. The header image can also be added to the inner pages. You are able to crop it to any size to make the perfect fit.

Customizing header image

As for social media, there are two ways to add. The first way is more traditional: create a social menu with your custom URL and add it to the social menu located on the top bar. The second way is using the Social Widget from Galeway. The author provides so many default URL here to help you quickly insert your link. I think both methods are so conveniently editable and you can considerably take advantage of both to make your page so connective and interesting.

Customizing social widget

One of the most interesting features of this WordPress blog is that the special widget location and the extra widget from the author. Besides the three footer columns and a primary sidebar, you can add widgets to the slide-out sidebar. Furthermore, the three special widgets from the author make Galway Lite more unique and outstanding.

Widgets from Galway Lite

Generally, other elements can be rendered properly without any mistake. However, I find one small matter with the menu: it doesn't display the second menu level as you can see what I did here.

Menu level doesn't appear

When using this WordPress blog every day, I'm so satisfied with all the post formats. They are easy to use and looks great.

The audio URL is embedded beautifully.

Audio

And here is how your video is shown.

Video

When you display your gallery in a form of slideshow in the Classic block, it's really pretty and prominent.

Gallery

Last but not least, this WordPress blog has a special thing: you can quickly change the layout of this post directly in Edit Post. So now, you don't need to move to Customizer, just stay in where you create the post and edit it easily.

Edit post layout in the Edit Post

I used some stool to verify the SEO configuration and realized that it still needed work to be completely optimized for SEO. To get it ready, you have to install a plugin. However, a beginner like me doesn't know which plugin is compatible and suitable for this theme because the author doesn't suggest any at all.

In terms of speed, this WordPress theme is pretty lightweight. I analyzed it with Pingdom tool and here is the result.

Website speed checked by Pingdom

At the moment, I can't find the theme documentation. I hope that the author will public it soon.

You can receive support from two methods: support forum and support ticket. They are all free for every user but I'm not sure if the support forum is for the free version. In the support forum named "Galway" (I don't know if it's Galway Pro or Galway Lite), I see the author answer only the latest topic and the others are left without any response. As for the support ticket, their support duration is from 9 am to 5 pm Eastern Standard Time, Monday through Friday.

In the WordPress support forum, I haven't seen any reply from the author so I guess Theminwp doesn't support there.