VT Grid Mag Theme Review

General design

VT Grid Mag has a clean, decent appearance. The masonry structure helps to make use of space inside the web page and allows the reader to have a quick look at the content of the page. The main design is primarily based on straight lines. Moreover, the author minimizes even the unnecessary details of the design to make it extremely straightforward.

Other elements

Grey, white and black is the main default color of the demo. The body background is white to ease your eyes while reading and the white background color of header and footer separates and emphasizes these areas. They are neutral and classic color, bringing a sense of elegance and harmony.

The author uses Open Sans Condensed to highlight the title. Meanwhile, the body content font is Inconsolata, which makes the text script and clear. I think that these fonts are more suitable with a male than female blogger as they lack softness.

To concentrate on the body content, there is no sidebar on homepage and no footer columns. The header is also very clear, spacious.

Header

The masonry structure wraps all post on the archive page in a very neat way. The information about the post is well-ordered, looking symmetric. Especially, I love the way the author shows the number of comment by the icon here to express this detail briefly.

Archive page

On a single post page, there is a sidebar on the right, next to the large feature image. The sidebar also has a simple design without any decorative element like lines or dividing boxes between widgets to avoid being messy.

Sidebar

But I think that the widget like Archives should have bullet points to mark each line. It would be easier to differentiate the before and after line than the current design.

Archives in sidebar

Responsive

This theme's design is flexibly adaptive in every device. It means that this WordPress theme is displayed nicely without any mistake in devices like PC, laptop, tablet, and smartphone. You can see the example design here using ami.responsivedesign.is.

example design here using ami.responsivedesign.is

If you want a beautiful website like the demo, you have to set up your website manually. After you activate this WordPress theme, the font and body layout are similar to the demo. The rest of things to do is set up the header, sidebar, color and creating your post. This set up is easy and quick for everyone, even a beginner like me.

I think some important features for a blog like related posts, social linking, social sharing, ... should be available in this free blog theme.

You can have more features like Additional Widgets, Featured Slider by upgrading to the Pro version.

I have applied all the custom feature to my website to write this WordPress themes review accurately. All the manipulations can be done directly in the Customize, but the number of custom sections is not much.

To begin, I change the layout of the homepage and sidebar. They can be rendered without any mistake.

Customizing homepage layout

Customizing sidebar layout

There is only 1 widget area: the sidebar. All the basic widgets are here but I want you to pay attention to the 2 characters that VT Grid Mag gives you: the Social linking and Latest posts. If you choose them, your widgets will have colored social icons and a list of the latest post with featured images. They look much different than the default widget of WordPress, right?

VT Grid Mag's widget

As for the social linking, you have to customize it in Social linking section. The author has the 7 most common social links for you. Insert the link and the icon will appear on the sidebar or on the footer area. However, these designated link will not enough if the user has a different social site to show.

Customizing social linking

If you want your post more creative, a header image will help you. You are able to select and crop it to any size and it appears on every page. But you should be careful to choose an image to avoid messing up with the title and menu.

Customizing header

Finally, you can choose an image for the background and modify some colors to prettify your site. All color can be applied properly. I tested all the color in my WordPress themes review and here is the example. Remember that the header background color and navigation text color only appear on every page except the front page.

Customizing color

To get used to this theme, a beginner like me just need a few hours. All the post formats are ready for you, such as video, gallery, file, single picture, blockquote...

It has a beautiful gallery that shows your picture with different size very orderly. You can even write the caption for each picture.

Gallery

The video appears like this

Video

The blockquote has 2 styles but it looks not much different from the normal text.

Blockquote

After checking the SEO configuration by some special tools, I see that hasn't had SEO practice in my yet. If you want it, you have to install a SEO plugin and find it yourself as the author doesn't recommend any plugin for SEO.

I checked the speed by PageSpeed Insight tools and it reports that the speed of this theme still needs work. It's a low score when using this theme on mobile devices while the score is medium when using VT Grid Mag on computers.

Website speed on mobile device

Website speed on computers

The documentation is categorized in different sections, from the support, general installation to other detail to customize the theme. The instruction is understandable with annotated screen captures.

I couldn't find the free VT Grid Mag in the support forum so I guess that they don't support the free theme. And in the WordPress support forum, I don't see the answer from VolThemes. I think they don't support here either.