Gridzone Theme Review

General design

The key features of the design is a unique layout. Together with the masonry layout, which helps your archive super well-organized and sleek, a sticky sidebar menu intensively made the appearance super rock-solid.

Plus, I love the way the author uses curved lines to create the soft corners. They reduce the sharpness as well as give an inspiring and comfortable feeling.

Soft corner

Other elements

The background of the whole page is light grey, which loosens the contrast with the background color of the content boxes. This mix of color doesn't only enhance the reading efficiency but also make the appearance so classic and decent.

Surprisingly, there is a dark mode that make your website into a bold and mysterious one.

Dark style

The Roboto family font is solely used in this theme. This family font is solid, simple and readable.

The minor things like these small icons seem to be ignored by the viewers sometimes, but they can dramatically contribute to the creativity and delicacy of the design.

The creative icons

The layout can restyled by changing the sidebar position from the right like the default one to the left. Especially, when you hide the sidebar, the three columns grid structure on the archive page turns to four columns to show more posts.

Four columns grid structure

On the single post page, it's like a paper putting on a grey wall. This arrangement resembles a real magazine, which enhances my reading efficiency to a higher level.

Single post page

The footer is extremely simple without any footer widget. The arrow button can be seen as an emphasis of this area. I love the simpleness so I like this airy and spacious design but I'm afraid that other users may think this area is too empty.

Footer

Responsive

No longer will you need to zoom and scroll around when browsing on your mobile phone or tablet thanks to the responsive design. It helps your website looks good in every device without any mistake. You can see the responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is.

This theme is ready for you to use without any enclosed plugin right after you activate it. The one-click demo import isn't compatible so it's impossible to have the demo content for your website. But I think that you won't need it if your website already has content. You just need to create the social menu, and sidebar, which is easily editable in the Customizer.

This theme has all the necessary features for a blog and more features like the Advertisement, Social sharing to help your website more feature-rich. However, it doesn't provide you Portfolio and there is no recommended plugin to have this feature for a Portfolio theme.

You can make your website more interesting and nicer with social share links, custom sidebars, custom page navigation,...which are compatible with the recommended plugin in the Dashboard.

Using Customizer, it allows you to edit all the custom feature very easily. You can change the basic features like color, header image, menu, widget...and many more advanced ones.

There are 2 sections with unlimited colors for you to choose from. Besides, it supports a background image to help your page more beautiful.

Customizing color

The header image can be cut properly to any size. But I suggest that it works the most perfectly with the header size of 1120 × 300 pixels.

Customizing header image

Furthermore, the Theme Options section allows you to edit all the elements in the header area like turning on/off the social, profile image or search tool. As for the profile image, it can't be resized so you have to cut it before uploading.

Customizing header logo

All the things seems to be very simple to be properly handled, except for the social link, which is somewhat complicated for a beginner to customize. You have the unlimited number of custom URL to insert here, but the way you add the social icons is different from other themes. You have to go to the Font Awesome link in this section, search for your icons and add the shortcode in the track. A non-professional coder may find it unfamiliar so the detail documentation is very helpful in this case.

If the icon confuses you, the color section for the icons can cheer you up. The author allows you to choose any color for different icons, making your website more colorful

Customizing color

There are many layouts for each part of the page and they can be rendered properly when you click the equivalent symbols.

Layout options

There are many interesting features in the styling. Notably, there are many basic fonts that you can quickly and easily choose from.

Lastly, the footer area has a few editable different sections. However, I find that the Footer Ads doesn't support all the common widget from WordPress as I did below. Meanwhile, the sidebar and other footer columns can be added all the common widget rightly.

Footer Ads

There is another problem with the Footer social link. Even when I enable this section, there is no social link, or anything else, appears around this area.

The work of editing is very easy with all the provided post format. I'm sure that even a beginner can get used to with them in one day.

The gallery is very beautiful despite having pictures of different sizes.

Gallery

The blockquote has 2 styles, which are both distinctive from the normal text with the quotation mark. But in the first style, the quotation mark partially covers the text like this.

Blockquote

This is how the video displays.

Video

By using some special tools to check SEO optimization, I find that this theme hasn't been ready for SEO yet. So if you want to have this feature, you have to install a plugin.

I used the PageSpeed Insights to check the website speed and see that the score is medium. I think this result is not so good but still acceptable.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

The documentation is written understandably and divided into different topics to help you quickly find your needed topic. But this is the general documentation for all the AlxMedia's theme, no particular instruction for Gridzone. Additionally, there is no image or illustration to help non-professional users understand it more deeply.

This theme is supported in the WordPress support forum. You can receive both the user and the author's help here quickly. In case you have a more detailed question or feedback, the support ticket is free for everyone.