Striker Theme Review

General design

The main characteristics of Striker are the cleanness and simpleness in design. The appearance's like a magazine putting on a wall. When you scroll the page, the magazine will float along the wall and make you feel like reading a real magazine. Besides the straight lines, the author has created the curved conners to make the magazine soft and friendly to the readers.

The soft conners

Other elements

The color scheme is so basic. It includes black and white only, but thanks to the beautiful image of the wall, it can be prettier. This image can be changed or even hidden in the Customizer when you install and customize this theme.

As for the font, the simple-designed family font like Bebas Neueregular and Helvetica are used to make Striker readable and look sharp, solid.

The homepage has only three important sections and I'm most impressed by the full-screen slider. However, if you don't choose the similar-size featured images for all the post here, the frame will keep the size of the largest image. Hence, it will look unbalanced as I did here.

View post on imgur.com

Similarly, it happens with the Recent posts section.

The Recent Posts looks unbalanced when the featured images have different sizes

The archive page has a list of posts with large featured images. Yet the posts are shown with full content so the list is lengthy. The post excerpt can't be changed in the Customizer, and you have to use Edit page to create "Page Break"

Responsive

This free WordPress blog theme has no problem when being displayed in all devices and viewports. It looks nice in tablet, smartphone, and any screen.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

This theme is ready to use right after you install. As it doesn't support one-click demo import, you have to manually set it up. Striker requires you to choose a static page as the homepage. This WordPress blog theme is quite different from the other themes when you have to set the front page template in the Edit Post instead of in the Customizer. After that, you need to create sliders and other sections like sidebar and featured text area.

Besides the common features, the featured post slider and social linking help your website more outstanding. The author doesn't suggest any plugin to have more features like Instagram Feed, Social Sharing or Related Post - the popular features for a WordPress blog - so you have to find ones yourself.

Unlike most of the other themes I've reviewed, the customization tools are Dashboard and Customizer. You use Customizer to edit basic things like color, background color, header image or widgets...

For example, there is an unlimited number of color to choose from but it contains only 2 sections for the header title and header background. Therefore, you should use a background image to give a brand-new appearance for your website.

View post on imgur.com

There are two common widget areas: footer and sidebar, where you can add every standard widget from WordPress easily. And you should remember that the footer widget columns only appear on the homepage while the sidebar is on all the inner pages.

It's super easy to add social media. You just need to insert the right URL of your site and the icon will show up in the header here. There are numerous designated URL for you, and they are all the most frequently used ones. But if you want to add a social media which is not included here? It's impossible and that's one limitation of Striker.

Customizing social media

Finally, to create the slider, you must work with the Dashboard. But don't worry. Even if you are not familiar with this method, I bet that you can still manage it quickly. By putting the post to the "featured" category, which is already created, this post will show up with the featured image and title in the slider. The number the slider is limitless so you can show as much as you can imagine.

Customizing featured slider

This free WordPress blog covers all the standard post formats. They look good and help your post more diverse as well as effective.

The gallery is well-organized like this even when your images have different sizes.

Gallery

This is how a video is shown.

Video

The blockquote is bigger than the normal texts to help you distinguish them.

Blockquote

Regarding the SEO optimization, I used some tool to check it. The result shows that this WordPress blog theme hasn't been effectively optimized for SEO yet. I hope that the author will improve it or suggest a plugin for SEO in the near future.

Congratulation! The speed is extremely fast so you don't have to worry about the time load. I checked it by PageSpeed Insights, a popular tool from Google.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

The documentation is written carefully. But it's for the Pro version only so it's different if you need instructions for this free themes. I still can make use of some common parts and you should read it carefully.

The support forum is for the pre-sale question only and I find no area for the theme-related questions. Fortunately, you can seek for help in the WordPress.org forum. The author replies to all the questions here quickly.