Minamaze Theme Review

General design

In general, this is a minimal theme with a decent and clean style. The basic straight lines are used to build up all the elements. For example, each content part is put on an individual transparent box so it looks super neat like this.

Other elements

When you have a quick look at this WordPress theme, you can realize that both cool and warm colors are used. But the cool color like back, white, light grey are used more often from top to toes. That makes it look classic and neutral. With the existence of some scarlet parts, it can be less boring and more energetic.

The typography is the dominance of only Open-sans font. I think this is a reasonable choice for reading purposes, but the text should be bigger to be easy to read.

The header area is simple with only text. To make up for this simple header, the amazing full-width slider makes the homepage more attractive. The Featured area with 3 posts in the grid structure is an ideal way to highlight your prominent aspects.

But I wish that every page can be as nice as the front page. On the other page and single post page, there is no header image of a featured image at all. That design somewhat reduces the attraction of the page.

On one last note, I would like to say that the widget areas can't be found. I don't see the sidebar and footer column anywhere. It can be explained that the author minimizes them to concentrates on post-performance.

Responsive

No matter which devices you use this WordPress theme, the design still looks nice without any problem. The slider is still as amazing as it is on the demo. You can see the responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is.

Without the 1-click demo import, you won't have the website looks like the demo right after installing. But the front page is already set up with the slider and featured areas like the demo. Now you just need to import your content and change the header, widget areas. I find that it's easy and quick to change these elements in the Customize.

This WordPress blog theme just covers the common features for a blog and recommends no plugin to have extra features.

The work of customizing may require meticulosity. You can change many sections and all of the custom features are in the Customize.

Firstly, you have an add unlimited number of the slider for the homepage slider in the Thinkup slider section. You can even add the title and URL to the slider here. There are even 2 styles for the slider: full-width and container style. And the height of it can be modified up to 500 px. That's such a good way to diversify this area.

If you want other styles for the slider, there is a Custom slider section require knowledge about coding. But I'm a blogger, not a developer so I don't need to use this section. Additionally, this slider can be disabled.

The featured area has at most 3 posts. I think that this number is adequate to perform your most prominent posts here. I test 1 post on my WordPress blog and see that it's easy to set up this section.

To add more elements to the header, go to the Header content and here you can control the Search tool and Social icon. They appear on the top bar and are distributed logically to fit with the design of the header.

There are 6 most common social networking site and 1 custom URL in the Social Media Content. You can carefully style the social icon by using the default or uploaded image.

From my point of view, besides the designated social media, I need to add other sites. And 1 custom URL is not enough for me to connect my readers to my social sites.

The style of the whole site can't be changed but you can modify the sidebar position to the left, right or even no sidebar. There are the sidebar options for the homepage, blog page, and single page. On the blog page, you can even control some option to make it fit with your purpose.

The most unique thing I find in this theme is the footer style. There are numerous styles for the footer column, the feature that I thought only the Premium version possesses. Such an amazing thing you can do to your footer columns. All the styles can be applied and every basic widget of a WordPress blog theme can be rendered properly here.

The custom color is restricted with only 2 sections. Yet when I change the header text color, it still remains black. I couldn't find any part that turns into green in this blog.

Like almost every other blog, you can choose an image as the background and select style, position and size to make it fit with the whole site.

Next, the header image is another choice to personalize your WordPress blog. You can crop it to any size. But I find the display not really attractive. I think that the title should be on the header image to make it look reasonable.

Other elements like typography, blog structure are fixed with the default style. But I think it's good for a minimal blog so you don't need any change.

This WordPress blog theme has all the post formats for you like blockquote, gallery, video, file, cover. It just takes me, a beginner, half of the day to get familiar with this theme.

The blockquote has 2 styles and both of them look distinctive from the normal text. But I somewhat think that the quotation marks lie in the unreasonable position.

The video is amazingly full-screen like this

 

The gallery is large and well-organized.

 

 

I checked the SEO configuration by a special tool. It reports that this WordPress theme hasn't been ready for SEO yet. Hence, you have to install a plugin to has this configuration. Unfortunately, a beginner like me may find it hard to search for a suitable plugin as the author doesn't recommend any in the Dashboard. I hope that they will update it soon.

In terms of speed, the average speed is medium. It's a bit faster when you use Minamaze on computer. You can see the result checked by PageSpeed Insight.

The theme documentation is divided into different topics so that you can easily find your needed one. They write it with the step-by-step instruction and understandable wording. But I think they should add some illustrations to make it clearer

You can receive the support from the author in the WordPress.org support forum. They answer very enthusiastically within a few days.