Start a Photoblogging Site with Portfolio Gallery WordPress Theme
Images play a crucial role in making a website look more attractive. And if you have an image-heady WordPress site, a well-designed gallery theme would be the perfect choice for you. These themes come with specialized design and layout for putting the primary focus on the images.
A quick search in the WordPress theme directory will provide you with lots of gallery themes. However, not all of them have the necessary features and options. Among the few good gallery themes, WordPress Portfolio theme by Web Dorado is a notable one.
This excellent theme comes with all the necessary options for creating a gallery site with the perfect combination of image and text. In today’s post, I will take a close look at the Portfolio Gallery theme.
Theme Design
Being a gallery theme, all the layouts of the Portfolio Gallery are based on images. The home page features a grid view of the posts. To take full advantage of the design, you need to provide featured images for all of your posts. And there is an interesting hover effect that seems to follow your direction.
On the left side, you will find the menu that is fixed in that position. The menu items are also provided with unique hover effects. You can further decorate the menu section with its background image.
The single posts view is also impressive. White text on the black background will be helpful in grabbing the attention of the visitors. If you don’t like this combination, you can quickly change the background color from the theme options section.
Portfolio Gallery is fully optimized for mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop devices. Therefore, your website will look great on any screen resolution.
Theme Customizer
You can download the free version of the theme from the WordPress theme directory. Once you install and activate the theme, you will be provided with a notice about some required plugins –
Once you install the required plugins, you will be able to make use of all the theme features. The customization options are located at the Appearance -> Customize page.
On that page, you will find the options divided into several categories. The first one, ‘Layout Editor’ allows you to choose the menu and posts, pages layout. You can choose to place the menu on the left or right and choose the menu width.
For the posts and pages layout, you have six different options. Other than the full-width default option, you can also choose to place the sidebars on the left, right or both positions.
In the ‘General’ section, there are some sub-sections. In ‘General – Main’, you will find options to provide custom CSS, choose the search result style, logotype, favicon, footer text, menu background image, etc. In the other sub-sections, you can choose to display social media icons, customize the site title and tagline, and choose a custom background for the header and the whole website.
In the ‘Homepage’ section, you can elect to feature post and display posts from a particular category only. The ‘Typography’ section enables you to choose a custom font for the headings, primary font, secondary font and inputs, text areas. For each of these, you can choose the letter spacing, transform text style, weigh and style.
‘Color Control’ is used to choose the background color of the site. And ‘Menus’ enables you to select the primary menu for the website.
As the theme comes with two widgetized sections, you will find two widget areas in the ‘Widgets’ section. From this section, you can choose widgets for the primary and secondary widget areas.
Pro Version
Portfolio Gallery also has a premium version too. The premium version of the theme comes with custom shortcodes feature. By using these shortcodes, you can create custom components without having to create them from scratch.
You will also get access to 8 different page templates. These templates allow you to create various pages as a blog, contact us, log in, portfolio, gallery, search, news, etc. within a click only.
The premium Portfolio Gallery theme supports AdSense and custom advertisement options. Therefore, you can quickly earn some extra money by displaying advertisements in the website. As a premium customer, you will also enjoy full SEO management options. In combination with your existing SEO strategy, these options will help you to get better search engine rankings.
And if you want to change the look of your website within a short period, you will find the four premium color schemes very useful. By applying any of these color schemes, your website will instantly get a new look. You can get all these features along with six months of premium support by purchasing the pro version for $20.
SEE ALSO: 30 Best WordPress Portfolio Themes
Conclusion
The traditional WordPress themes make it hard to showcase your image-focused content in an attractive way. Portfolio Gallery solves that problem by providing unique and interesting layouts.
I think Portfolio Gallery is a great theme for creating a fully functioning gallery website. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.