Shapely Theme Review

General design

Shapely has a sharp, clean and clear full-width design. Every element is "airy" and spacious enough to make me feel free and comfortable. Interestingly, this theme is embellished by many striking parallax sections.

Other elements

The template of the demo orients to the ocean view. You can see it through the parallax sections on the homepage with the images of the sea and waves. Skimming through this page, I bet that you all may feel like contemplating the beauty of the sea and even hearing the waves sweeping. That is the result of the combination of the parallax effect and the choice of image. Hence, you should take advantage of this design to select the best outfit for your website.

The main colors, besides the white background and grey text, include the blue elements to mimic the color of the sea.

Raleway, the only and the default family font in this business theme, is so clear to read.

From my own point of view, the only unreasonable aspect of the design is the posts on the archive page. It looks pretty "rough-hewn" with this design. Unfortunate for me, the style of this page is unchangeable.

The "rough-hewn" design

Responsive

Using Sharply in different devices or seeing it on any viewport causes no problem at all as this WordPress business theme displays nicely in all types of screens. Notably, the hero image is still so stunning in all viewports.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

After installing, you can use this business theme immediately without any other extra actions.

The One-click demo import is a strong tool to lets you have all the demo data by just one click. But first, you need to install the Shapely Companion plugin in the Recommended actions. It's easy to install so don't worry if you are a beginner in this field. Plus, the process of importing data is extremely fast, in just a few seconds.

If you don't want to have the demo content, just manually set it up by using Customizer and Dashboard. Like most of the other business themes, you have to set up a static home page and create all the front page sections in the Customizer. Then, change Template for this page in the Edit Post, and now you can add front page widgets to this page. Setting up all the elements on the homepage is the meticulous work. But don't worry, the documentation can help you use Customizer and Dashboard to create and edit them easily.

The Testimonial and Portfolio are compatible with Jetpack. You need to install it and enable the modules included. This plugin is already suggested by the author and is easy to set up.

This business theme requires you to use both the Dashboard and Customizer. As I have mentioned before, you have to be quite meticulous to edit this theme because of a lot of the customization tools.

The most noticeable feature in Customizer is the Homepage widgets. It's where all the elements on the front page are edited. Each element is a single widget from Sharply as you can see here. Besides, there are many other extraordinary widgets made by Colorlib.

The special widgets from Shapely

They are all easily customizable. You can even carefully change the style and/or color of some widgets.

As for the Portfolio and Testimonial, you have to create posts by using the Dashboard first. After that, you are able to edit the number of posts for these sections. It allows you to add an unlimited number of items here, which is such a good point.

For instance, the Main Client section can directly be modified in the homepage widget section. The author doesn't restrict the number of items so just add anything you want to this carousel.

Customizing Clients section

Moving to other things, there are many more custom features, both basic, minor and advanced ones. It can be editable without any difficulty if you're patient and meticulous as the numerous number of things to custom may confuse you. However, I think that you should pay attention to the Blog Setting section and Theme Options the more as they will dramatically change the appearance of your page.

For example, I am free to choose any color for many custom color sections. Along with these custom colors, you are allowed to change the background image. In these ways, your page can be extremely personalized.

Customizing color

They are just the tip of the iceberg. There are abundant minor things that you are able to edit simply. Use and explore them all.

All the common post formats are very easy to use. You don't need much time to get used to them.

Blockquote looks not much different from the normal texts except the quotation marks.

Blockquote

The gallery is very airy like this.

Gallery

And this is the way a video is displayed.

Video

I checked SEO by some tools and saw that this WordPress theme hasn't been ready for SEO yet. Thereby, you have to install a plugin that helps you to have this function. Among the recommended plugins, there is no plugin for SEO so you have to find one by yourself.

I tested the speed by PageSpeed Insights. The score is quite good, nearly reaches an excellent level.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

All the instructions about Sharply are wrapped in the understandable documentation. There are even video tutorials to help you learn quickly.

There is a support forum for everyone. You can view all the topics here without logging in. And to create a topic and receive answers from the author, you have to register for an account first. It's quick and free.

In the WordPress support forum, I see no response from the author so I guess that they don't support here.