MinimalBlog Theme Review

General design

The style of the demo is the box layout that resembles a magazine put on a violet table. But you can be changed to the fluit layout when you customize. I prefer the box content layout as it emphasizes the content strongly.

Fluid layout

Almost all the elements of this theme are made from straight lines, making the design strong, solid and simple. Additionally, to add some softness to the design, the author uses the curved lines in 4 corner of the featured images like this.

Curved corners of the featured images

As a result, this softness gives the harmony, gentleness and friendliness to the readers at the first look.

Moreover, this theme can be ideal for a rich-media website as it has a very good way to perform the images or video. For example, the featured area and the large featured image on the homepage display the images very prominently.

Other elements

The main tone of color is electric indigo, the combination between violet and blue, making the appearance so deep and rich. And the background color of the magazine is white, a traditional choice, to highlight the black texts. That color palette, in general, is the main factor to make the design so decent, clean and impressive.

Lato is the only font used in this theme. It's readable, straightforward and wide. If you don't like this default font as in the demo, there are numourous standard fonts for you co choose in the Customizer.

As for the header, it has 3 style and three of theme all look good, well-organized and reasonable. Plus, the demo's header is sticky, which can be disabled if you want.

Header layout 1

Header layout 3

Along with the list structure with the right sidebar in the demo, they provided you with another 2 column-grid layout and more alignment like right/left or no sidebar. My favourit layout is the grid layout and with no sidebar like this to lets the reader quickly view the body content and focus on it.

Grid layout without sidebar-

The last words, The design on single post page is also very neat and clear. Particularly, the related posts are shown by the featured image only, looking very prominent and stunning on this page. Moreover, they are in the form of a slider to save the space. Yet I find an unreasonable feature: the blank space on the right side of the slider here, making this area quite unbalanced.

The latest posts

Responsive design

This free WordPress theme has a very beautiful and flexible way to display in different devices. I don't see any problem with the design in every device like PC. laptop, tablet and smartphone. You can see the responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is.

This free WordPress theme can be used flawlessly right after you activate it. The installation is also very simple. However, it doesn't support the 1-click demo import so you have to spend time to manually set it up to have a similar website like the demo. The work of manual editing includes choosing the layout, color and setting up the widget, featured area, so you may need a few hours to explore the Customizer. Don't worry, it's very easy to use powerful Customizer.

Using the Customizer, you can easily set up every aspect of this theme as you want.

First, I test the color section and see that with 3 color section, you can select any color to give the distinctive and colorful look to your page. Plus, it also supports a background image to make your page more creative.

Customizing color

Secondly, I try uploading a header image but can't see my image anywhere in my website at all.

The header image doesn't appear

Then, I focus on the Minimalblog setting section, which allows me to carefully customize abundant of features, from the header style (3 header layout as I describe in the Design), body layout (grid and list), sidebar position (left, right, no sidebar)...to the smallest elements like the Preloader or excerpt length. All these characters can be edited easily and properly. And I will write more about some of the most important features below.

There are 2 kinds of featured content: Feature Sections and Sub Featured Section, which can be shown or hidden as you want. It's very to customize these sections and they can be rendered immediately in the right way.

The Featured Section shows one chosen category in the vertical photograph. Moreover, it has another fluid layout for this area. If you enable this layout, the Featured contents are displayed full-width. But I prefer the default style as it looks better and airier than the fluid style.

Fluid layout of the featured section

Finally, I have only one recommendation for you in this design: you should choose the same number for the post and slider. Otherwise, there will be a blank space on the right of this area, looking unsymmetrical.

Customizing Featured section

The similar thing happens to the Sub Featured Section.

Customizing Sub featured section

These 2 sections have the same thing in common: the unlimited number of posts and slider, and only the category to show. It's good to freely display as many posts as you want, but it's also restricted when you are just allowed to show only category rather than pages or single posts.

In the Typography Section, you have more than 20 basic fonts to change. It even lets you customize the size and style easily.

Customizing typography

Last but not least, they give you 5 most popular social media  so you just need to insert the URL and the equivalent icons will appear on the top bar. However, I think that 5 is a low number and it lacks many other common social media. Hence, If want to add my channel like Instagram or Linkedin, which are also the popular social sites, it will be impossible.

Customizing social media

This free WordPress theme has all the necessary post formats that you may need. They display well and you can edit them very easily.

The blockquote has 2 styles and they look nearly the same. But compared to the normal texts, they are very different.

Blockquote

The video embeds this way

Video

The gallery is well-arranged and neat.

Gallery

I check the SEO configuration by some tools and see that it hasn't been ready in mind. I hope that the author will update it soon or suggest a plugin for SEO because beginners like me may find it hard to search for a suitable plugin.

This theme needs to work more on the speed as you can see the result checked by PageSpeed Insights here. It shows that this free WordPress theme has a medium speed.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insight

The documentation is demonstrated in the form of a video. Hence, you can have the best visual instruction and can understand it thoroughly. But if you want to quickly scan the needed topic, the video will take you more time to find than written documentation.

There is a free support forum where you can receive very helpful answers from the author himself. Moreover, the search tool can help you rapidly search for the needed topic by entering the keywords.