Gridzine Theme Review

General design

As most of the trendy blog themes nowadays, Gridzine follows the clean, simple and readable style. Moreover, there are multiple layouts for the header and footer and many special widget areas to make your page versatile and diverse.

Other elements

The core color scheme has common tones like black, white and some minor blue parts to make a highlight. The combination of color brings about light, open and bright appearance. As for the typography, Roboto is the only typeface in this theme. This font is readable, solid and simple, which coincided with the general design.

Besides the default header style, there are 4 more ones. The header styles are gradually minimized, from a complicated one to the most simple one like you see in the picture below. All the styles look fine, but my favorite one is the first one as it contains all the elements in a well-organized way.

The five different header styles

Likewise, the footer style can be changed from the default one to three other style. The "footer two" and "footer three" hide your footer widgets and look not so different. I want to advise you not to choose "footer four" because it's unbalanced with the left blank space like I did here.

The footer layout four

Together with the slider carousel, the full-width slider is a good choice for you to add under the header. You are able to add it to any widget area but I still strongly suggest that position. The slider can convey the title and encourage people to read more very effectively.

Featured post slider

The list on the archive page is the only default structure. The featured images are shown with original and large side, which look so prominent. The inner pages also look nice and easy to read.

Responsive

This WordPress blog has nice ways to be displayed on different devices or screens. It looks pretty and reasonable in tablet, smartphone, PC, or laptop without any mistake.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

You can use this WordPress blog smoothly right away after you install it. The work of setting up is also very easy. It has no One-click demo import, but it's still so simple to make your website resemble the demo. If you have the posts, then just add the Three-column Slider Gridzine Widget above menu, social linking, sidebar, and footer. Generally, powerful Customizer can help you handle all that work quickly.

Together with all the common features for a blog, the Social linking and Featured post slider can help your blog more interesting and outstanding. Other advanced things like Instagram Feed and Social buttons are not available in this WordPress blog so you have to install a plugin. However, the author doesn't recommend any plugin so it's your duty to find yourself.

The Customizer is easy to use and very helpful. Just by using it, you are able to edit all the custom features including basic and advanced ones easily.

There are many ways to prettify and personalize your website like changing color, header image, background image properly. However, there is a mistake with the header text color. The header text color stays unchanged when I select a new color and even the other header styles.

Customizing color

The special temperament of Gridzine is that you can add widget not only to the sidebar and footer but also to the Below Menu area and Above Footer menu. Notably, besides all the common widgets from WordPress, there are 4 extra widgets from Gridzine. They are more unique, diverse, and give more interesting features as well.

Together with the Gridzine three-column slider, which can be seen in the demo, I highly recommend the Full-width slider in the below menu area. You are able to choose any category or the latest posts with any number of posts. Although you can just display posts, not pages, I still think that the author gives you adequate power to manage these widgets.

Adding below menu widgets

Here are the Gridzine's author widget and Related posts widget, which looks much better than WordPress's ones.

The extra widgets from Gridzine

The social link is very easy to add and even hide. You just need to insert the URL, the beautiful icons will appear on the header and footer as well. There are up to ten most popular default social sites, quite free for you to add. But if you have any link except for these default sites, it's impossible to show.

Customizing social media

Plus, I want to remind you about the header layout. In the Design, you can see how different the five header styles are, right? And you can see that the header style four and five won't show the social icons. Remember that fact to display your social icons properly.

Finally, there are some advanced featured you can customize quickly and properly. It allows you to meticulously edit and control your website even the smallest elements.

Advanced options

There are all the necessary post formats provided to help you simply create a diverse and interesting post.

For example, when you insert a Youtube link, it will be showcased like this.

Video

The table without borders may be quite difficult to distinguish from the other parts of the post.

Table

You can collect your image in one gallery. Don't bother to choose any picture with any size you want because it's still well-organized like this.

Gallery

After I used tools to check the SEO optimization, I knew that you need to install a plugin for SEO as it's not been effectively optimized for SEO yet.

And the speed is so so. You can check it by Google PageSpeed Insights, one of the most well-known tools to check speed.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

I can't find the documentation for this theme now. Perhaps, when I come back in the future I can find it.

Feel free to contact the author via a support ticket. It's totally free and they will respond within 24 hours.