eBusiness WordPress Theme Review
Elegant Themes never ceases to amaze me with their feature-packed, great looking, and affordable themes. eBusiness is the latest theme from the theme club. This theme is ideal for those looking for a WordPress CMS-style theme for their website, while still maintaining some blog functionality.
In this review post, I’ll be going over my experience with this theme, including setting it up and how to use it to run a business CMS site, as well as a blog.
And now onto the review…
Setting It Up
First you’ll need to be a member of the Elegant Themes club ($19.95 per year) to download the theme. You’ll notice the download is around 30 megabytes in a zip file, however most of the file size is made up of the Photoshop sources which won’t need to be uploaded to your WordPress site.
All you need to upload is the /eBusiness/ directory to /wp-content/themes/ as well as the two plugins included in the zip to /wp-content/plugins/. Here’s what your site will look like on a fresh WordPress installation.
Remember, I just installed this WordPress and haven’t added any posts or pages yet. The tabs along the top with respective filler content under items like “Welcome to eBusiness,” “About Our Company,” and “Our Services” are already included with the theme. These can be changed later in the eBusiness theme options page.
Theme Options Page
Since this is such an extensive theme control panel, instead of writing about it, I decided to make a quick video tour. Click to watch it below.
[See post to watch Flash video]
As a quick recap, here’s what the different tabs do:
- Layout: Let’s you control the blog skin and color choices (9 different options), website structure (page based or blog based), as well as “about us” content.
- Homepage: Applicable when “page based” is selected in the previous tab. Let’s you control which pages are displayed on the homepage (maximum of 4), as well as the slider content (maximum of 3).
- Blog Setup: This lets you control how the blog looks, hide or display certain items, as well as set thumbnail size and quality.
- Navigation: Controls page and category navigation. You can exclude items, choose how to sort them, and disable the “Home” and “Blog” links if you wish.
- Manage Ads: This lets you control how many 125×125 ads are displayed (6 maximum), as well as the image and link. Also allows you to enable the 468×60 ad (displayed on top right) and lets you specify where it’s linked to as well.
There’s also a nice overview on this eBusiness theme release post at Elegant Themes.
Alternate Skins
As I mentioned above, this theme has three different skins, along with three color schemes each, making for a total of nine different options to choose from. If you watched the video, you would see how easy it is to change the look of your entire site with just a few clicks.
Earthen has a grungy look and comes in red, blue, and purple.
Radiate, my personal favorite, has a more professional look, and comes in blue, green, and red.
Smooth has a darker, smoother look and comes in blue, green, and pink.
Conclusion
The theme options page is easy to navigate and understand, and is a big improvement over the last Elegant Theme I reviewed, Influx. The built-in ad management is also a nice touch, but I’m wondering if people who use other types of ads such as Adsense would have trouble integrating that with the theme.
Also, in my last Elegant Theme review, I had a section titled Things I Would Do Differently. While the Gravatars are now built-in to the theme, unfortunately I could not find any WordPress tag support whatsoever. I realize this is primarily a business theme and most people probably wouldn’t need it, however it wouldn’t hurt to add, and all it would take is adding the following line somewhere between the Loop in single.php to have them displayed on single posts.
<?php the_tags('<p>Tags: ', ', ', '</p>'); ?>
All in all, this is an excellent theme which would be great for a page-based business site, as well as a standalone blog. This theme alone is worth the $19.95 per year, except with Elegant Themes, you get access to not just eBusiness plus all of their other great themes.
Posted in Theme Labs
