Read More Theme Review

General design

Generally, when viewing the whole page, I can see both the neatness and creativity at the same time. The design is built mainly from the straight lines, looking straightforward and solid. With the soft corner of the featured images, it also show a mild, kind, and tender temperament.

Curved corner in reality

In the demo, I see the sharp corner only. But that doesn't affect the general design much.

Sharp corner in the demo

Other elements

The author chooses the safe color like black and white for the texts and background, but also adds the blue color elements to make it more energetic and cool. This combination of color follows the readable purpose and modern design.

The default font types are Monserrat and Poppin. When I just quickly scanned the page, I hardly saw the difference between 2 fonts in the heading and the body text. So I think it’s quite boring to me. But the advantage of them is that they are both san serif type, open and easy to read.

The header is simply designed with all the centralized elements, looking really symmetrical. Moreover, this theme supports a sticky primary menu so whenever you move, you can still keep an eye on the menu at the top of the page. Notably, the first screen becomes extremely outstanding thanks to the full-screen slide. It contains the post title on an overlay, which is an effective way to draw people’s attention and encourage them to click the read more button

Featured post slider

A special area of this theme is the Blog feature section. The 3-column grid structure and the post’s information lying on the feature image is to help save room for other areas.

On the front page, there are many special widget areas that you can be found in Read More only. The layout of these widgets is arranged very closely. So sometimes, I wish that could be more spacious to make the reader feel more open and relaxed.

Down to the site lies the footer area in a different black area so it is very unique and prominent. As you see that straight lines are used very frequently to divide different parts. But to my mind, I don’t like that much because these lines are glitzy to me.

Footer

Like the menu, there is the sticky sidebar. Moreover, it will surprise you with the 2 sidebar areas on the left and right of the page. You can choose different positions the sidebars and choose to show or hide them. But I suggest you not show both sidebars as it narrows the main post content.

There is 1 list style for the archive post page and multiple choices for the featured image size. For example, the small feature images help the reader focus on the post content while the big feature image can draw people’s attention. Each type has different strength depending on your purpose.

Responsive

This theme is fully responsive, which means that it’s adaptive in different devices like PC, laptop and mobile, tablet. It looks nice and well-arranged without any mistake. You can see the designs here using ami.responsivedesign.is.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is.

This theme is ready to be used after activating without any extra step or enclosed plugin. Additionally, it has one-click demo import to help you quickly turn your website into a beautiful site like the demo. It requires you to install the Acme Demo Setup in the recommended plugin tab of this theme. After activating this plugin, go to this theme documentation and download the Dummy content that can be found in the Documentation. It may be complicated for a beginner, but I believe that I will be so simple when you read the instruction carefully.

If you already have a full-content website and don't need the one-click demo import, you can still set it up by your hand very easily with the help of Customizer.

Along with the necessary features for a blog theme, there are many interesting ones to make your website more outstanding.

Thanks to WooCommerce, Readmore can be used as an E-commerce website.

There are a lot of elements to set up, both basic and some advanced ones. They can be modified in the Customizer with the live preview.

Besides the default color, it gives you 2 options to modify. You can change the color or choose an image of the table, as well as replacing the hover and top menu color to make your website colorful. Otherwise, an image can also be set as the background.

Customizing color

Unlike color, you can’t change the font and size. The header, despite having a sections in the Header image option, can't be found anywhere when I choose an image.

Header image is invalid

As you see, the “Social” is the 4 social icons on the left of the top bar. It just allows you to add URL from Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Google Plus, which lacks many popular social linking.

Customizing social media

Next, there is only 1 style for the slider. You can on/off this section and if you display the slider, it will replace the header image. It’s optional to choose one among your categories here. One restriction of this section is that you can’t choose more than 3 posts. I think that it is not enough to show off your prominent posts.

Customizing slider

Same as the slider, you can choose only 1 category for the Blog feature section. I choose a category with 7 posts but only 6 posts are shown here. So I guess that there are maximumly 6 posts for this area.

Customizing Featured section

There are many positions for the sidebar: left, right, center, both sidebar, no sidebar or middle column. Especially, you can change this position for the single post page, the home page, archive post page, and product page. Hence, it allows you to flexibly control the sidebar position to fit with the different page. One more thing, you can disable/enable the sticky sidebar.

The blog can be shown or hidden in the archive post page. But I think that no one wants to hide this important section. The essential section user should pay attention to is the featured image size. Along with the different size for the post thumbnails, there are multiple choices for the featured image’s resolution here. I advise you to choose the large or post-thumbnail to make them look better.

Customizing featured image on archive page

As I said before, this theme has many widget areas. There are not only 3 footer columns to add widgets but also it has many more.

Widget areas

This is where you can add all the common widget from WordPress and 4 extra beautiful widgets from Read More.

Special widget from Read More

Lastly, ff you are a meticulous person, I guess that you will like many minor custom details like the button design and pagination page. There are abundant sections for you to carefully style your website, but I also suppose that so many sections may confuse a non-professional user to some extent.

I suppose that a beginner like me find no difficulty in using it in a few hours. All post formats like the gallery, video, file, heading, and blockquote are available.

You can display all your images very beautifully in one gallery for convenient watching.

Gallery

The video screen is small. So you may need to zoom in to watch it easier.

Video

The blockquote with 2 styles: one with a small font size, another with a bigger font size. Both kinds of blockquote look bigger than normal text. But I see no difference because it has the same font with normal text. The smaller style only has one vertical line next to the quote.

Blockquote

One particular feature when you edit the post is the sidebar and post-layout section. Besides setting up these section in customization, you can edit it right here. These sections appear at the bottom when you choose a new block. It’s a convenient way to see and change the post layout.

Edit the single post page layout

I used some special tools to check and find that this theme has not been effectively customized for SEO yet. Maybe in the future, the author will improve it or suggest a plugin for SEO.

As for the speed, I used Page speed insight. It shows that the speed medium and still needs to be improved.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

The instructions are divided into different topics so that users can easily scan and find the needed one. There are annotated screen capture images with detailed and step-by-step guides. They are understandable and effective.

You can receive help from 3 kinds: support forum in the theme homepage, F.A.Q and support forum in WordPress.org. Remember that this is the free version so you should choose the free Read More forum. To reply and create a topic, you have to register and log in. It's totally free for all the free themes.
Additionally, I see some responses from the Acme Themes in Wordpress.org support forum.