Down to Earth Template for Green Company Wordpress Premium Theme Review
If you’re a enviromental company or non-profit organization and you’re looking for something simple but powerfull, look no further, here’s Down to Earth Template for Green Company Wordpress theme. Fixed width and two columns it may look simple but it has some really nice features under the hood and it’s functionality and wordpress integration is just amazing. There are some pages in this theme that are going to surprise you.
Home Page
The home page includes two important parts that are extra from your normal wordpress blog/website. One is the Slideshow. This part contains custom selected images from posts that will be resized to fit in the big box at the top. You also maybe notice the 1,2,3,4 numbers over the left part of the image. That’s for navigation of course and it does it’s job in a simple but effective manner. But wait, I’ve jumped something:
The Header
EcoGreen Logo is a picture as you might have already figured out. But you can place anything you like there by replacing the image inside the images folder from your theme. Jumping a little again to the search box that’s hard coded into the right side of the menu, this part of the design is well placed so it saves up space and blends with the menu in colors and sizes. There are other elements in the menu like the little quote right above the sidebar and the toll free number at the very top-right..
But the most important part of the header is the menu. Colors blend in well, it’s plain simple but well aligned and formatted, the menu has the look of a simple ordinary menu. It is a simple menu but it has a nice feature attached to it. If you notice the light white-gray part of the header right under the menu. That seems like a nice designed portion.. but it’s more than that.
If some of your categories that will show in the menu (that’s what the links are… post categories combined with pages) have sub categories, they will show right in the space under the menu that will have a slighter smaller font fitting just perfectly into the design. Nice js effect, simple… nothing too fancy.
The Content
If you’re searching for well organized content, this is it! From quotes to lists, from titles to pictures and galleries, this theme has it all, it’s taking care of all the CSS you will need for your content , seamlessly integrated with what wordpress requires from it’s themes, you will write and edit text in your admin panel with no worries as it’s always going to look great here.
Another cool feature is the pictures. You can add special shadows to them how ever you want them to be (just like the example above). And that’s not all. You can make galleries from pictures that will open in your commonly known lightbox-type interface. Here’s a example of a gallery inside a page:
And here’s how it looks with the lightbox loading once user has clicked a picture:
But the content part does not stop here. It has more to offer and we are jumping at comments.
Comments
On pages or posts you can enable comments as they are styled very nice, plain and simple and blending perfectly into the theme. They are exactly how they should be as part of this theme and nothing more. You can notice how the custom avatar default icons, content form structure and submit button have a unique theme-friendly design and usability.
What about threaded comments?
It has those too. And a funny interesting and unique thing that I’ve noticed on the threaded comments is that as you go a level deeper, the text font get’s bigger. Now that’s funny and cool at the same time. Great idea!Usually a content review stops at comments or footer. But we are not quite done here yet, as this particular theme has more to offer.
Sliding Lists
Meet the FAQ section of the theme:
You may not see this now, but in the live demo you can. The FAQ page has a nice sliding option when you click the titles. It looks great, it saves up space and it’s just one of those things that’s “hidden”, and you won’t learn to appreciate it unless you need it. Interesting choice nevertheless.
More Visual Styling
What you’re seeing above is the list view of content when you search for something or when you click a category or tag. That’s how it looks like from that point of view. So when I said that this particular theme is simple and has everything, I was not joking at all… All the styling you will need for a CMS is embedded in the theme. Here’s more:
This is a Testimonials page with quotes in the content. You can see how they look, and to make it that good is hard. I’m personally looking at that page as if it was a picture or something made in Photoshop. Not actual text in a webpage that’s dynamic. You think I’m exaggerating? Try to make the quotes like that with the alignment and the name and company at the bottom look like that. It takes a while to decide the aligment in photoshop.. coding makes things more complex. But this particular “quotes” feature is well implemented and a great idea on the design. Simple and effective.
The Sidebar
One static custom option as a green box with description and a flexible sidebar configurable from the widgets panel in admin. Styled, aligned, delimited… all ok at this point.
The Admin Panel Page
Just Under the Appearance Left menu, you will find a new sub-menu named “EcoGreen Options”, as the admin panel page to manage the theme. It’s what you need to modify exactly the necessary options and values, from the menu to the footer text:
You can change the logo, the welcome message, contact number at the top-right in the header, you have slideshow options to pick what posts to show from which category and how many should they be, the posibility to exclude anything from the menu and so on. Exactly what you need to make the theme work as it was built to work you have in one page with a average list of options.
What Have we learned?
That simplicity is great for performance, that there are hidden things in anything that seems simple and those things make that simple thing so great. This theme is not just for environmental companies. It can be used for your blog, website, what ever you have. And it’s so great because of all the elements that have been taken care of in it’s design and functionality.
Another cool thing is that because it is premium, you get support from the developer. So in case you run into trouble and the readme file does not do the trick, you can contact the developer to answer your questions.
