What are WordPress Themes, and why do we Need Them?
Well, most of the time, you’re going to be using WordPress themes or a page builder like Elementor or Beaver builder or Gutenberg or any of those other ones. And you’re going to be editing all the websites. But the top and the bottom, the header and the footer you’re going to be using WordPress themes for.
You can create any site you want with page builders, so if there’s one thing to take away from this article is to choose your theme based on your needs and its backend capabilities.
And if you don’t want to use a page builder, then you will actually be using these WordPress themes to customize the page itself as well, and they do come with certain customization capabilities in that, to be a little bit more specific.
A theme basically gives you more customization power over your fonts, colors, stylings, layouts, and things like that. The first thing that I want to get into with all of you is in the middle of customization and ease of use.
Flux:
It is unique because it provides motion effects for the loading screen and template motion effects for the entire page. I thought that this was a very interesting feature. While in the customization tab, you can choose from different page motion effects that automatically take care of animating your site.
The pre-loading animations are pretty cool too. You have options like a loading bar that you can customize, so that’s pretty cool.
It also offers a unique back-to-top button that’s sticky to the bottom of the page, which has interesting motion effects. It was the cleanest, most professionally animated back-to-top button that I’ve seen without having to do any editing or customizing too.
Maybe you all don’t geek out over things like that, but I wanted to go over it.
Then go to the appearance tab and show the website frame and other aesthetic options as well.
Overall I was impressed with the amount of animation and floweriness that the site achieved from a stock perspective. Most of the time, to get your website to look this animated and professional in terms of motion effects, you have to change many settings on individual buttons, and that takes some time.
So the fact that this one was a cookie-cutter motion theme that was pretty cool. These are some interesting concepts for this theme; however, it doesn’t offer a transparent header, much less a header builder or footer builder in the free version, so I personally wouldn’t use it.
Deep:
Right off the bat, this theme has one of the most powerful and detailed headers and footer builders that I have seen. You could use this theme if you’re comfortable not using a web page template because deep doesn’t actually provide templates. Rather it gives you a demo importer, which is essentially just a theme importer.
All that it downloads is stuff like fonts and colors, it’ll give you pages, but they’re just completely blank.
It comes with too many unique features like smooth scrolling back to top buttons and much more.
You can even choose from style layout options for blogs which is cool too, but the best thing that I thought about this theme and that was incredible is that in Elementor, you get 50 new widgets that you can use, which is a huge plus for someone who uses Elementor all the time.
Most of the additional widgets from deep usually have tons of types or styles within the widget, so I thought that was pretty sweet. I also noticed that when you download the theme for deep, you will have a minimal capability to edit your header and footer.
To get the header and footer builder, you’ll have to download the actual “deep core theme” you can do this by just going over to the add plugins tab on your WordPress dashboard and then searching “deep core.”
Oceanwp:
It is a powerful theme that has tons and tons of customization options and capabilities. On the other hand, I felt like it was a bit too cluttered and a little overwhelming in that the customization tab seems unorganized and has too many options.
For an experienced web designer such as myself, finding out where everything is was not hard, but this could prove difficult for beginners. To make something unique, you would have to use something like the Elementor header and footer blocks plugin, which is just a plugin that you can download.
Oceanwp has a basic header settings tab and offers a transparent header that many WordPress themes don’t for the free version, so I thought that was kind of nice.
It does, however, have a top bar, so you can enable it and then enter in some social icons in it or something like that. I would venture to say that oceanwp has some additional features than the other WordPress themes on this list, but they’re not that special.
It has a back-to-top button which is nice a pretty plain though it offers a 404-page customization tab, a top bar, a header without a header builder, so that’s a little complicated to use, and then also just a blog post customization.
I would definitely recommend downloading it and trying it out and giving it a good experience, but I personally don’t use it. After downloading a theme, you can always go back and deactivate it at any time, so it doesn’t hurt to try it out.
Astra:
Astra has a huge repository of templates out of all of the other WordPress themes, and they have some of the best-looking templates as well. The design quality can be a bit subjective, but I personally like the templates on Astra a lot more than the other themes. The reason I like Astra better than oceanwp is mostly for the starter templates. Astra offers 70 templates, with 35 of them being available for free use.
Oceanwp offers 73 in their library, but it only offers 13 of them for the free version, so it’s 35 versus 13.
So you have a lot more to work with when it comes to Astra, besides. In terms of free use only, I think that Astra is the much more appropriate choice with its starter templates and the plugins and extensions available for free with Astra. I think it’s the best theme for the beginner website designer.
The downside would have to be that it’s rather limited in its design capabilities and has much fewer customization options than the other WordPress themes on this list, like oceanwp.
If you’re already very familiar with Elementor and you believe that you can create some stunning designs, you can choose a different theme with more options than this.
Blocksy:
Blocksy definitely supports Elementor, which is the preferred page builder. It’s also highly rated and respected, and it is also perfect for what you plan to use it for. Well, I think that Blocksy has the most organized backend of all the themes, and it also has a super easy switch from the light and dark WordPress themes.
I believe that this is my favorite theme when it comes to creating websites. Because of its capabilities, it has the best of everything that I like to offer when it comes to WordPress themes. It has a back-to-top button transparent header, header, and footer builder. It’s just as detailed as deep by the way website frame that’s customizable blog customization and starter templates.
You have to download the “Blocksy companion plugin,” which is the supporting plugin similar to oceanwp and deep, where you have to have that supporting plugin for it to work properly. However, I think it’s the best theme out there still. The header builder is incredibly complex and powerful but not complex in a bad way.
Blocksy will give you full control of the header and the other headers as well. I mean by this that you’re able to copy headers from page to page and then edit them individually for different pages, which is pretty cool. Another really cool feature is the off-canvas menu, where you can actually have an icon in the top corner. Then customize a menu to appear when triggered once it’s triggered. You can then fully customize the background, the widgets, the logo, and everything else from colors to fonts; I think the off-canvas menu is pretty awesome.
