Timber Lite Theme Review

General design

This striking and vivid design absolutely gives you a big surprise. It's like you are reading a film strip with the horizontal frame, not the common vertical frame. Beside, Timber Lite makes me feel that it's very sharp and solid thanks to the straight lines and the other simple-designed but so daring elements.

Other elements

The color and typography in the demo are the default types. Apart from black and white, there is no other color in the palette. That black-and-white orients to the retro and classic style. But if you don't like this style, you should choose the images with more vibrant colors. I'm sure that they will change the look of this WordPress portfolio considerably.

The family font is Sans-serif, the basic and simple font used with large size in this theme. It dramatically contributes to the sharp, clean and "strong" appearance.

The full-screen portfolio sliders on the homepage are the most outstanding feature. I love the smooth transition from one to the other slider so much. It makes me feel like I'm reading a real magazine or a lookbook. And so does the archive post page. The list of posts floating horizontally when I scroll down, so interesting, right?

The featured images of the other pages are also full-screen and look very harmonious with the other elements. But as for the single post pages, the featured images don't have that good layout. The first screen areas of these pages are so empty like this.

The first screen area in the single post page

And I've found a mistake when my site title is longer than three words. You can see it in the picture below. The site title area looks really cramped. In addition, I think that the curved line under the menu is quite unsuitable with the sharp design of Timber Lite. I suppose that the straight line is much better.

The site title and curved line

Responsive

This WordPress portfolio is friendly with all devices. It means that if you use it in your laptop, PC, tablet, smartphone or view it on any viewports, Timber Lite still looks good.

The responsive design checked by ami.responsivedesign.is

Installation is not a hard task. It's easy to install and ready to use without any enclosed plugin. However, it's quite complicated to set up your website to make it like the demo.

Because the One-click demo import isn't compatible with this theme so you have to use the traditional way. First, you surely need a static front page with a featured image. If you're familiar with the Customizer, you'll know how to choose a static homepage. But there is another step to make it a project slider. In the Admin panel, you need to set up the Project slider layout and choose any project you want to display here.

Set up the homepage with Portfolio Slider

Before that, remember to create the project. It's as simple as the way you create a normal post in the Dashboard except for the Classic Editor.

Creating a portfolio in the Dashboard with the Classic Editor

It doesn't limit the number of the projects so you are able to freely show as much as you want to show on the homepage.

Second, to have a Portfolio Archive page, it's almost the same as the first step above. Yet now you need to choose the Portfolio archive style.

Set up the Portfolio Archive page -

Although these steps are different from the other themes, I think it's not so difficult to implement.

The author provides you with enough features for a portfolio theme. But if you want more interesting features like Related Post, Instagram Feed, you need to install plugins. There are no plugins that the author suggests so you have to find yourself.

Because there are not many things to custom, the work of customizing is easier than ever. Everything is almost unchangeable, for example, color, background color, layout, typography, widgets. You are just allowed to change the very basic things like site identity, menu, homepage setting.

The only noteworthy custom feature is social media. You are given the limitless number of links to share by creating custom links and adding this menu to the social location. If your URL is correct, the icon of this social networking site will appear in the header properly.

Customizing social menu

When being in use every day, this photography theme can prove its ease of use and proficiency with all the standard post formats.

This is the gallery. It helps display your image in an orderly way.

Gallery

And the blockquote makes your citation much easier and more prominent.

Blockquote

Insert a Youtube link, and your video from Youtube will be there, catchy and lively.

Video

I tested the SEO configuration by some tools and realized that Timber Lite has not been ready for SEO. I hope that the author will improve it or suggest any plugin for SEO in the future.

How about the speed? There are many tools to check it and I used PageSpeed Insight, a popular tool from Google. It shows that the speed is good: 82/100.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

The documentation contains all the theme-related topics. The author writes it very carefully and I like his kind and polite manner. But there is no illustration to make it clearer for a layman like me.

Now I don't see any official support from the author in the WordPress support forum. Therefore I think that you just can receive the answers to your questions from the user community here.

Yet through the Pixelgrade Assistant plugin that they recommend, free users are offered support by opening a ticket to the support team.