RichOne Theme Review

General design

Generally, the design is extremely simple and spacious without any decorative tool. The author bases on the straight lines to build every element so the appearance is solid and "strong".

Other elements

The black, white and grey tone of color make the theme a retro and basic one. Additionally, in the demo, the author displays the black-and-white pictures so they enhance the bold and dark style of this theme. If you choose color pictures, it can be more lively and bright.

Orienting to the straightforward style, the typography includes Muli and Helvetica, the two Sans-serif fonts with clear and solid visual design.

There are not many things to say about each element of this theme except that they are just very pure and sleek. The most beautiful part is the posts on the archive page. They are displayed in a two-column grid structure with large images. You can choose to show the excerpt for your blog, or hide the excerpt to make this theme suitable with a portfolio. This grid is also the only layout.

Posts with excerpt

The sidebar doesn't appear on any site to keep the people's attention to the body content.

The footer is more distinctive than the upper parts as it lies on a grey background. To me, this design is very effective to stop the boring whiteness throughout the appearance.

Footer

The amazing full-screen featured image on the single post page is the emphasis of the whole design. Moreover, the body content background is like a magazine putting partly on the featured image. Hence, this design brings about creativity and relaxation for readers.

Single post page

Responsive

Thanks to the responsive design, this free WordPress theme can be adaptive in any kind of device and screen. It looks good on desktop and mobile devices without any problem.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is.

The installation is so easy just like the way you download and install other free WordPress themes. To make it look like the demo, you don't need to do much. I have all the necessary content for my website so I just need to customize the footer widgets and post excerpt. The task can be done quickly in the Customizer.

Besides all common features like Gutenberg editor and post formats, there are some interesting ones like Related posts and Sticky menu. But it lacks some necessary things like Social sharing, Social linking, Instagram Feed...to make your website more diverse and beautiful. You must find plugins to have these features because the author doesn't recommend any at all.

The list of custom features is quite short. It includes mainly the basic one and very easy to be customized. You just need to use Customization to edit theme.

There are lots of widget area apart from a sidebar. All the basic widget from WordPress for you to display.

Widget areas

All the widgets can be rendered properly in all the areas. For example, there are four default footer columns widget and a bottom widget.

Footer column widget and bottom widget

Although there are many color sections, they won't considerably influence your website as they just make changes to the minor elements. You can see the trial I did here.

Customizing color

Unlike most of the other theme I reviewed, an image background is not compatible with RichOne. It doesn't allow you to edit the typography and layout as well. But I think that the default fonts and layout are good so you don't need to change them at all.

Last but not least, the Misc section gives you some bonus options. You can edit them by one tick and the changes are applied immediately.

Other bonus options

All the necessary post formats are provided and displayed stunningly. I will take some of them as examples below.

The video is full-screen so that you can enjoy it without zooming in.

Video

The gallery is well-organized and attractive.

Gallery

You can add a cover with the title on an image.

Cover

I checked the SEO compatibility by some means and see that this theme hasn't been totally optimized for SEO. The author doesn't suggest any plugin to have this feature so it's difficult for a layman like me to find a suitable plugin for SEO.

To check the speed, the PageSpeed Insights can do this mission. It indicates that the speed is good, nearly excellent with 86/100 score.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

They give you detailed and helpful instruction for this theme. But I think that there should be written step-by-step rather than a long sentence to make a non-professional user like me understand easily.

If there is any question related to the theme you can contact the author via email or Skype. It's free for everyone.

In the WordPress support forum, I don't see the answer from RichWP so I guess that doesn't support here.