Simple Melody Theme Review

General design

The author named the theme Simple Melody as it looks simple and as sweet as a love song. This is particularly matched with a media-rich blog as it focuses on displaying media in the best way. The general style is minimalistic and clean without any decorative elements like lines, button or icons. The homepage is like an art exhibition where the featured images of the posts are displayed in a grid structure. No texts, sidebar or other elements bother the performance of picture here, just the images take the spotlight.

General design

Other elements

The colors are harmonic and bright. The background is white, while the text, footer background or other factors are the different tones of grey.

Footer background color

This palette brings about the sense of being classic and simple.

The types of font used here are Libre Baskerville and Muli. The Muli is easy to read in a long post and the Libre Baskerville makes the heading more prominent and beautiful.

The header here is very simple without a header image. It just contains the menu and title arranged very neatly. The footer area has 3 footer columns, divided by slim straight lines, looking so spacious.

As I described, there is no sidebar in the demo. I think the purpose of it is to concentrate on the main body content of the page. By the way, the posts on the front page having no excerpt is to follow that purpose. Just when you hover an image, the title and information appear on this image.

Title and information appear when hovering

The grid structure on the homepage is effective to help readers skim and scan quickly the page. And the large images with original size make the homepage outstanding.

On the single post page, the featured image is also attractive and stunning. It stretches out and is full-screen like this. But I think it's so large compared to the content so the whole design of this page is quite unbalanced.

Single post

Responsive

I bet that you will definitely use your website on different devices. Don't worry about how this theme performs in a smartphone or tablet as it is displayed fine without mistake in any kind of device. You can check the responsive using ami.responsivedesign.is.

Responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

You will have to edit your WordPress blog a bit to make it look as good as the demo as it has no 1-click demo import. But it won't take much time. You already have the default color and font, now just set up your own header and footer very easily in the Customizer.

Moreover, the author suggests you install the Jetpack plugin to have more features. It takes you a few steps to install, activate and set up Jetpack. After that, it tells you to activate the recommended feature in the Setting board. Don't worry if you are a beginner. I don't know much about Plugin but I can still install and set up it successfully.

These features are compatible with Jetpack: Like Button, Social Sharing, Social Linking, Related Post.

To review accurately this WordPress theme, I tested the custom section and see that it's not difficult to change at all. You can modify the custom sections in Customizer but there are not many options. For example, you can change the background color only.

Customizing color

Or you can also choose an image to set it as the background image and custom to make it look good with your WordPress website.

Customizing background

In the Theme options section, you can set up some elements here. They can be rendered properly without any mistake.

Theme option section

As for the Sidebar and Footer, you can add all the basic widget here. I think you should set up all the 3 columns as the default. Because if you add less than 3 ones, it will leave a blank space on the right like this, looking quite empty.

Footer with less than 3 columns

I'm sure that you can quickly learn to use this theme to edit your post in an hour. They give you all the necessary format for a WordPress Blog. When I review Simple Melody, I have created a post with some essential post formats.

Firstly, when you cite something, a blockquote is needed. It has different font and size from the normal text so it looks stunning and nice.

Blockquote

The gallery is organized very nice although the images have different size.

Gallery-

Video is shown that way, comfortable to enjoy.

Video

As I used some special tools to check, I see that this theme has been already customized for SEO.

I used the PageSpeed Insight to check the speed. The average speed is medium. If you use the theme on a computer, it'll be faster. Although it's not a really good result, I think it's acceptable with a free theme.

Website speed on a mobile device

Website speed on a computer

The documentation is divided into different topics, including F.Q.A. The instruction is understandable, step-by-step and with the illustration. But there is no guide for Jetpack installation here so you have to search it on other Searching tools.

In the WordPress.org support forum, you can create a topic and receive a reply to the answer from the author here. They respond quickly and kindly. Or on the theme homepage, a live chat will help you resolve your problem when setting up this theme.