Pixgraphy Theme Review

General design

I'm interested in both the sophisticated and simple design of Pixgraphy. Generally, the appearance is clean and clear, seems to be quite straightforward. But when looking closely, you will find some special parts decorated very carefully. Furthermore, I'm attracted by the "unity" of the design when all the elements are made from straight lines and used mostly the same shapes.

Other elements

Merriweather and Open-sans are the 2 default fonts for this theme. This combination of 2 fonts is very nice and easy to read.

The color choice is "safe". I love the light grey background as it eases my eyes while reading. The red elements warm up the cool color, making the design balanced. However, I find that the white texts on the hero image are quite difficult to read. I really want to change this color but it's impossible.

The general layout is full-width. Or you can change it to a full-width or small box-layout when using.

But personally, the full-width layout is my best layout as it makes me feel so free and comfortable.

If you look carefully, you can see the "unity" in the design that I've mentioned above. The author uses the rhombus elements frequently from top to bottom. Even the social media icons play as decorative tools in the header and footer. These minor factors strongly attract people's attention and make the design extremely innovative and unique.

 

Next, the footer has its own background image. This image and the social icons embellish this area to a new higher level.

I'm very satisfied with the sticky header. When you scroll down, the header menu lies in a transparent bar so it doesn't cover any space of the body. That's not a thing that many themes can do.

Moving down to the body content on the archive page, there are a lot of images that can be shown by the masonry structure. It's really an effective layout for your portfolio theme. To switch to a blog, you just need to choose another structure in the Customizer. It has only a list structure, but two styles: large and small featured image, which are both reasonable and good to use. Especially, a sidebar will accompany you on the archive page if you choose that list layout.

Responsive

When you use this WordPress theme in different devices, you can see that it can be flexibly adaptive to any kind of screen. The design looks god without any problem and the slider is still beautiful. You can see the responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is.

It's easy to install Pixgraphy, just like other themes. This free WordPress theme can run properly without anything else.

The one-click demo import is compatible with Pixgraphy so you can have all the demo data within some clicks. The author already links you to the Theme Freesia Demo Import plugin. All you need to do is downloading this plugin and then installing it to your website. After it is activated, you must choose the free demo and click to it to start the importing process.

If you want to set up in the traditional way, it's still very easy when you have a full-content website. You just need to add a header image and social icons which can be done quickly in the Customizer. As for the slider, it's a bit different as you have to edit it in the Edit Post section.

It doesn't only have enough basic features for a blog and portfolio, but it also gives you the social linking and featured post slider to make your website more beautiful and effective.

But that's all the available ones. If you want to have more like the Related Post or Instagram Feed to attract the reader and show off more from your other channel, there is no recommended plugin from the author.

Customization requires you to use both the Customizer and Dashboard. Most of the custom features can be edited in the Customizer apart from the slider. You have to enable the "Stick to the top of the blog" section and set a featured image for your post. It's quite different from the common way, but I think it's not difficult at all.

In this way, the author doesn't limit the number of sliders for you. You can choose any post, and then apply the location of your slider (on the front page, entire page or hide it) by using the Customizer.

Now let turn to the Customizer, where the Layout options section has many interesting editable things. For example, I choose the box-layout for my website. I see that all these sections can be applied quickly and properly.

If you choose the box-style, the background can be recolored or you can choose an image for it. But there is only one section for the color so I can't make my page colorful as I want.

There are seven default social links, which are the most common ones. But I'm afraid that if you have another social site like Youtube, you can't add to your page.

Besides the sidebar like many other themes, this theme allows you to add widgets to the header. It gives you all the popular widgets from WordPress and one special widget: TF contact us. It's much easier to use this special one to create a contact section than using the normal Text widget.

Lastly, there are a large number of other minor things so that you can carefully edit your website. Just by one click, the changes can be rendered properly.

This WordPress theme gives you all the necessary format from WordPress theme and even a layman can quickly learn to create and edit them in a few hours. I will show you examples of some common formats here.

You can create a stunning gallery like this.

Besides the normal text style, there are many others like code style or blockquote. They look very distincive.

 

The SEO configuration hasn't been available in this theme yet so you have to install a plugin to have it. However, the author forgets to suggest any plugin for SEO. If you're a beginner, you may find it hard to know what plugin is most matched with your website.

As for the speed, I use PageSpeed Insight to test it. The average score is medium and I think it needs improvement.

The documentation is written carefully and sufficiently. You have the step-by-step and detailed instruction and annotated illustrations for every aspect of the theme.

The support forum is for premium theme users only. For free themes, there is a ticket system. But first, you have to create an account and login to see the forum and make a topic here.

I don't see any answer form Theme Freesia in the WordPress support forum so I guess that they don't support here.