Voice Blog Theme Review

General design

At the first look, I guess that you will be attracted by the youthful and fresh style of this theme. The author created it by using both curved and straight lines but the curved ones dominate more. Besides, straight slim lines are used frequently as a dividing and decorative tool. This design makes it look both modern and slender.

Curved and straight lines used in the design

Other elements

Color and font play a very important part of an effective design. In this theme, the author uses the common default color: black and white for text and some background area. These colors are a safe choice for this theme. But it doesn’t look boring at all when combining with other orange small elements and colorful social icons to make the highlight. As for the font, there are 3 default font types: the charming, eye-catching Merienda with big size for the Web’s heading and title, Poppin for Post’s heading, Muli for Body text. These fonts bring about a sense of softness and eye-comfort, very easy to read and matched with the feminine style.

Moving to the header area, you can find only one style for this part. The header may be the most prominent area with a super large full-screen hero image. That definitely attracts the visitor and leaves a long-lasting impression at first sight.

Hero image

The Website heading and title appear directly on the hero image with a slim line separates them. I advise you to shorten your Website’s name. Since if the name is too long, the line will totally divide the hero image into 2 areas and become an unnecessary detail as I did.

The long slim line dividing the hero image

One thing I like about the header is that all the components: menu, website’s heading, and title are justified, looking so symmetrical. Moreover, there is a sticky menu so when you move to the bottom the menu still appears on the top of the page.

Generally, the Header area is arranged in an orderly, tidy way, which is extremely straightforward and attractive.

On the archive post page, you’re provided with 2 layouts: grid and list. Each layout has only 1 style for you. The post list with alternative positioned images is a catchy way to make the blog creative and different.

The list structure

On the other hand, the grid structure with 2 columns helps you to grab people’s attention to the number of posts. Despite not having an abundant number of layout, I still believe that these 2 different styles are quite nice and adequate to change.

Responsive

When I use this theme in different devices like my laptop, PC, tablet and iPhone 7, it’s adaptable and beautiful to all the screen sizes. The theme looks logically and neatly, especially the large hero image is displayed reasonably and prettily in different screens.

But I find a very small mistake. It’s when I switch to my smartphone, the title at the bottom stick very near to the slider navigation.

The mistake of responsive design in smartphones

After activating, you can use this theme immediately. But don’t be surprised if your website looks different from the demo because it doesn’t have 1 click demo import. Hence, you should set up a bit to make it look nice and well-arranged. The work of manual set up is very simple and you can do it easily with the help of the powerful Customizer. Notably, the beautiful hero image from the demo already displays on your website.

It can be seen that many features are not supported in this theme. It’s a disadvantage if you need more functions like a post slider, featured content or double banner slider widget, you have to upgrade to the pro version.

With the help of Customizer with live preview, you can quickly change many features here.

There are 3 noticeable elements that can change the whole look of your site: color, font and the background image. You can upload your image and set up the background image. As for the color, it allows you to modify background color, header text color, and link hover color to make them creative and colorful.

Customizing color

However, you can not change the font and size of any part. But I think the default font that I described above is already fine.

As I mentioned above, there are many widget areas that allow you to add every supplied widget. Among them, I find the navigation bar so interesting. It will skip out when you click the arrow symbol on the right of the menu bar. This unique feature is aimed at saving space for other more important parts.

Widget areas

Interestingly, the author created a special widget to display your post in a carousel. You can freely select any number of posts and kinds of posts to show here.

Next, the front page layout area lets you add 3 widget areas appearing. I’d love to display the gallery in this area, but my images are shown with a low quality.

The low quality of the gallery on the front page widget

The footer area has 3 main elements: 3 default footer columns, site title, and social linking. You can enable/disable site title, which lies in the center of the page with a bigger size and underlined text.

It’s impossible to change the default position and style of the sidebar. It appears statically on the right and you can enable/disable it at every post or page. Apart from the basic widget in the widget library, the author gives you 3 sections that you can enable/disable: About me, Sidebar post and Quote section. Especially, in the Sidebar post, you can choose any category to show as well as select the unlimited number of posts and other information.

Sidebar section

Plus, there are 4 social linking: Facebook, Insta, Pinterest, Youtube can be optionally shown on the right of the copyright text, header, and sidebar. I don’t think that giving only 4 fixed social linking is a good idea as they’re not enough for users.

Customizing social media

On the Archive post page, the user can enable/disable many sections of a post but can not do anything to the excerpt.

Similarly, there are many sections to enable/disable and choose on the single post page. The related post section shows up in 3 default columns and will change to slider if there are more than 3 posts. You can even choose any number of posts to show. Actually, the recent post is a “hook” to make the reader continue with other posts.

Single page section

It takes me a very short time to work fluently with this theme. There are all forms of the post like video, file, quote, gallery… Now I will introduce the feature of some forms for you:

Firstly, you have a gallery to perform all your picture in a post. This grid structure arranges the image quite well and airily even when the images have different sizes.

Gallery

Blockquote style is bigger than normal text so that you can distinguish them clearly.

Blockquote

video is displayed with a large size so that you can watch it easily without zooming.

Video

I found that SEO configuration is not available in this theme yet after using some checking tools. So if you want to have this function, you have to find a plugin yourself. I think it may be hard for a beginner as the author doesn’t recommend any plugin at all.

Speed is not a strength of this theme. It has medium speed for a computer and I think it still needs work.

Website speed checked by PageSpeed Insights

Postmagtheme gives many articles for this theme’s documentation. But you should read carefully because this is documentation for both the Free version and Pro version. There is both general and detailed instruction for each part with annotated screen captures so that you can imagine and understand them thoroughly.

You can receive the support by using the ticket system to leave a comment under the theme introduction. I see the that The Postmagt admin replied a comment within just a few minutes.