GreatMag Theme Review

General design

DigiMag has a minimalistic style. That explains the less use of decoration and unnecessary detail in the design. It looks cool, elegant, and brings about a sense of relaxation and a peaceful atmosphere. However, GreatMag only uses straight lines and sharp borders, so this theme is a bit "hard". Thus, I think that the design of this free WordPress magazine theme is suitable for a minimalist having a quite strong personality.

Other elements

The light grey color is the key factor making this free magazine theme so cool and decent. While other colors in minor sections adding liveliness to the theme, hence, avoiding being so "pale" and boring. If you want to change the default color, feel free. There are tones of color options for you to turn this cool-color theme to any style you want.

Lato and Open Sans look quite similar because they all have simple and solid styles. Therefore, using these typefaces is a good choice for a minimalistic theme like GreatMag.

Now, I will review the first screen area carefully as it's very important to seize people's attention.

This place is a combination of a few header elements, which are arranged neatly and logically, and the featured post section. Among all the elements, the featured post section is the most beautiful. Instead of a common grid or slider style, this area is so unique and creative. Posts are shown clearly with title and category for easy viewing, while still keeps the tidiness and creativity.

However, look at the Latest News section, this is pretty inconvenient to navigate to the next post as there is no navigation icon.

The first screen area

The footer lies in a wide separate black area so you can see that it's really prominent. Especially, the Editor Choice area with large images is the most eye-catching.

The footer area

GreatMag has up to 4 layouts for the archive page, including the search result page.

Different layouts for archive page

To my mind, the two list layouts are the most reasonable and pretty readable. The other grid layouts make posts near to each other, a bit difficult to scan and skim.

Responsive

To adapt to all screens and viewports, DigiMag has a good responsive design. That means it looks great on any device without any mistake.

Responsive design

It's not difficult to utilize this free WordPress magazine theme. But if you want to have a website like the demo in a minute, you can use the One-click demo import plugin although it's not recommended in the Install Plugin tab.

To manually set up GreatMag, you have to use both Customizer and the SiteOrigin page builder.

SiteOrigin page builder is just as simple as using Gutenberg blocks. But it has one advantage compared to Gutenberg: there is a live preview to quickly check the result.

Set up site with SiteOrigin

Using SiteOrigin, it's simple to have extra widgets and layouts to easily design a page/post for your website. Besides all the standard widgets, there are 8 ones from GretaMag. All are awesome and necessary for your magazine site.

Extra widgets from GreatMag in SiteOrigin

Additionally, the needed features for a magazine are pretty sufficient in this free WordPress magazine theme. But if you want to have more like Instagram Feed, Related Post, ... you have to install plugins.

If you edit your website with SiteOrigin, it's a bit more complicated than using the Customizer. But you should definitely learn to use it if you want to have a sophisticated homepage. As I mentioned about, it's not difficult at all if you're already familiar with Gutenberg, and it's even easier with the live preview.

Moving to Customizer, it's powerful with many particular options.

Especially, the large number of color options allow you to turn this cool theme to a tremendously colorful one. You can choose any color without any limitation and nearly change the color of all the parts of this theme.

Customizing color

GreatMag supports Google fonts so you can change the font to any font you want. You should read the documentation to know how to do it. But don't worry, it's not so hard as you may think. Then, I find one problem with the Font weights to load section: it's invalid like this when I chose one.

Customizing typography

There are many sections for the header area. You can add a cropable image here. But it isn't shown on the homepage, just displayed on inner pages like this, which is different from most of the other themes, right?

Customizing header image

The Latest News section allows you to add up to 15 posts here. It's not unlimited, but this number is enough, I think.

Customizing the Latest News section

Then, I want to see how the advertisement banner looks at the header and I advise you to choose the recommended size: 728 x 90px for your image. It looks surely better. Don't use an image as I did here, it will ruin your header adv.

Customizing header advertisement banner

With all the common widgets from WordPress, you can render them properly on any widget areas. But I have a problem with the custom sidebar.

Custom sidebar

I created a custom sidebar and add widgets to it but I can't find any place displaying this sidebar at all.

Together with common blocks from Gutenberg editor, you can use SiteOrigin to easily add more widgets and layouts for any post/page. But SiteOrgin widgets have some disadvantages in terms of design.

For example, in this review, I compare the gallery from Gutenberg and SiteOrigin. You can see that the gallery from Gutenberg looks prettier and more well-organized.

Comparison of two galleries from SiteOrgin and Gutenberg

Gutenberg is also quicker to manipulate. In the meanwhile, SiteOrgin requires more steps, for example, embed a video URL, than Gutenberg. But luckily, the result is similar. Videos from both tools all display beautifully.

Video display

After verifying this theme's SEO with some special tools, I found that GreatMag hasn't been really ready for SEO yet. So you should use a plugin supporting this feature.

You can check the speed of this free WordPress magazine theme by many online tools. I used PageSpeed Insights and here is the result.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

It's not so excellent, but still quite good.

Each part of the documentation is wrapped in different video tutorials. Video tutorials are helpful and easier for users to follow. But I find that the documentation lacks some parts for Customization. The author seems to focus on the most important and difficult parts.

By signing up for an account and creating a ticket in the support forum, you can receive free support from the author quickly. Besides, the forum is arranged logically to help users have the quickest experience. You just need to find GreatMag in the Category, use the search tool, or the topic having the right color of this theme's tag.

You can also find support from aThemes in the WordPress.org support forum.