WordPress Portfolio Gallery Theme is the new minimalistic template with stunning and responsive layout. This creatively and elegantly designed theme allows to make unlimited portfolio pages or posts; customize default images, titles, fonts and colors. The theme is responsive, SEO friendly and widget ready.
The new WordPress Portfolio Theme has been launched couple of weeks ago and gained a big popularity among WordPress users. The theme was immediately included in Top-100 of Best WordPress Themes on GoDaddy’s charts. At first sight it looks as if the theme is designed for photo-blogging only, and that is very much true. Having in mind the fact of beautifully organized image thumbs on the homepage, with detailed description and image zoom-in options, any photographer, graphic designer, artist with a need to display his or her works can showcase products at the best. Same is true for those who want to present their knockout online portfolio with detailed exhibit.
With the growing number of photographers in media, WordPress does not pull the great selection of Free themes, this is probably why I am personally very much excited to discover Portfolio Gallery Theme. The Demo page of the theme strings the homepage first and the very first thing that pops out is the selection of image thumbs collected beautifully. Each and every post shall include an illustration or a default image, so that the theme could generate the illustration to pull it up front. Post thumbs allow users to have a sneak preview via the lightbox before reading the post, this is something interesting as well, and brings this illusion of popular WordPress Photo Gallery dotted on homepage. The whole collection of posts can be displayed in a lightbox with the auto-play option as plugin well and this is indeed another great tool to showcase images, chapters and menus. All this can be played via 15 lightbox slide transition effects, that are available in the Professional version of the theme.
Portfolio Gallery appears to be fully responsive, which is obviously a great fact. Sounds a bit naive, but a lot of Free WordPress themes that I have been testing around failed to come as responsive. This guy is awesome both on Android and iOS devices. Appears to look crisp on desktop too. Developers claim that the theme guarantees maximum flexibility of its layout on any device and has full cross-browser compatibilities.
Another user-friendly thing that I experienced is its full color control availability. Portfolio Gallery Pro version is bringing unique experience in this regards. I personally had bad experience with Free WordPress Themes when the subject comes to color configuration. A lot of themes require to write custom CSS when changing and modifying template, even some major free themes lack to include options to edit every corner of its layout. In a contrast Portfolio Gallery includes a massive dashboard of options allows to customize each and every feature of the theme with text, button, light-box background, menu, title link colors and more. This is something I was glad to discover as well. Speaking about programming skills, it is worth to mention that this guy does not require special adroitness due to the variety of available options. Although the theme includes a custom CSS field in order to make some personal customizations, for those who are skilled enough in this field.
I also like how the theme works with WordPress Photo Gallery plugin and included additional albums and galleries in couple of my posts. Short-code allowed me to showcase my gallery right in the middle of my article using thumbnails view. It looks cool in Masonry and Mosaic views as well. Another trick that I came to meet with was the option to change the default front page to a static page. This gives me more power to parade and unroll my photos too. Setting Portfolio page template as a front-page allows sidebars and post thumbs grid, while making possible to insert a slider, or a short-code.
The theme includes font options too. First of all it is a selection of the most popular fonts, allows to set fonts for header, primary font, inputs and text areas. It also has this option to set a style and choose between bold and italic styles, set letter spacing and more. You can customize header text, menu, link text, logo and body fonts too. Among rather minor, but pretty unique features of a standard WordPress theme are the options to install full sample data if needed, edit it as they add unique content by time or remove the sample data right away.
Did I mention the fact that the theme is SEO optimized and includes additional menu to add custom titles for all pages, including homepage and posts, include meta description, keywords, set an order for description and/or title for the automatic title generation.
Other cool features of the theme are contact form with a Captcha, widgets that can lead users to major social network pages, AdSense and HTML5 advertisement areas.
At the end I reminded myself German architect’s Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous aphorism saying, “Less is more”. This is very true when speaking about Portfolio Gallery Theme, with its beautifully crafted framework in a simple, yet attractive way.
