Short Theme Review
Today we will introduce another free WordPress theme for business from ThemeAnsar. Its name is very memorable: Short.
With the stunning frontpage and many premium features, Short deserves one of the most excellent free WordPress themes for any kind of business or company website. Moreover, it comes up with the innovative, modern and professional look. Try and enjoy it now.
General design
Short is a grid-based, full-width and creative WordPress theme. In fact, the entire look of this theme is totally built for a trendy, professional business or company theme. Especially, the front page with many well-designed features is the most outstanding and creative part of Short.
The author uses both straight and curved lines to make a harmonious and well-balanced design.
Other elements
The main color scheme of this theme is blue, giving a sense of being cool and fresh. This color, when combined with the box-shadow style, can create depth of the sky with white clouds, like this.
There are many elements building up the creativity of this theme. For example, the watermark in each section of the front page and the scroll-up button looking extremely unique here.
I'm sure that all the readers will have a long-lasting impression with the first screen area. The full-screen hero image and the Top Contact can convey all the important message in a very trendy and attractive way. And you can see that these icons look really beautiful in the fish scales shapes. The scroll-up button also has this shape, creating a striking design.
If you disable this image, the Top Contact will be covered partially. So you should definitely use a hero image here.
On the archive page, you can see that the list of post and the sidebar are well-arranged and spacious, giving a sense of "flow" and readable. Especially, the featured images are very amazing, large and prominent.
All the other page has a full-width header image. It contains breadcrumb and a large title to catch people's attention and play an important role in decorating the page.
Responsive
It's totally responsive and adapts really well in all the devices like smartphone or tablet. You can test it by your devices or use ami.responsivedesign.is.
To have the similar-look like the demo, your website must have a front page. After selecting a front page in the Customizer you have to set the "front page" template for this page in the Edit Post. And then, you need to install Short Build plugin to have all the front page sections. This recommended plugin can be seen when you open the Customizer. This is the change before and after installing this plugin.
Available Features
- Comment
- Post formats
- Gutenberg
- Service
- Portfolio
- Author-bio
The Portfolio and Sercive make this theme suitable for business websites, but this theme still lacks Testimonial. There is also nothing like social sharing, social linking to boost the interaction of your visitors and your company. The author doesn't suggest any plugin so you have to find one to have extra features.
The Customizer can edit all the custom sections, both basic ones like color, background image, menu, widgets to the advanced features on the homepage easily.
The color can be changed properly. But you are given only 2 sections for the header title and background. To make your page more unique and innovative, you can set an image as the background.
You can change the header image but the aspect ratio still keeps the default size. Plus, the overlay is fixed, looking quite dark.
Moving to the Homepage sections setting, you can carefully customizer as well as enable/disable each section.
As for the Slider section, in fact, there is no slider, just a static hero image in the header area.
It's quite complicated to edit the Top Contact. First, If you just upload a new image for the background of this section, it won't show up properly. You need to click the box "Enable callout image overlay" to make it appear. Secondly, there is no instruction in this section on how to add an icon.
Similarly, you have to add a shortcode for the icons in the Services section yourself. This section has 3 default items. It's a pity that you can't add more than only three.
As for the Blog section, I can't find any way to show the post excerpt instead of a full post.
There are all standard post formats are given to help you create a diverse post.
For example, the gallery displays very well and nicely.
Here is a blockquote, which is different from the normal texts.
You can demonstrate your data in a slim and spacious table like this.
The SEO configuration hasn't worked optimally in this theme yet. So if you want to have SEO optimization, you need to install a plugin.
Using PageSpeed Insights, you can see that this free WordPress business theme has medium speed. It's not so excellent but I think it's somewhat passable.
They give you readable and understandable documentation. But this is the Short Pro documentation so you should read it carefully to know which section is for the free version.
The support ticket is for the pro theme only. As for the free themes, they say that their team will fix and check it frequently to ensure that there is no problem.
The Verdict
Don't hesitate to try this business theme with many premium features for a company website. Its trendy, innovative and professional design will surely satisfy everyone. The One-click demo import is an advantage to help you save time customizing and to have all the demo data in one minute.
However, this theme hasn't been optimized well for SEO and the speed just stops at the medium level.
In conclusion, I strongly believe that it's worth using Short, even when you are a beginner or a non-coder.