If you’re simply a writer, and you don’t have a clue about how to designing landing
Expressing your emotions and feelings through words is the best way to clear your mind.
But that’s not everything. It’s proved that by blogging you can earn a living. You can support your family. Reach wider audiences. Do what you want with your life.
A lot of people think that creating a site is hard and it requires coding skills. But thanks to WordPress, starting a site is the easy part. The writing part is the hard one. Also, there is one additional thing that might distant you from your desired success: the design of your site.
If you’re not sure how to craft your site to fit your needs and present your content in the best possible way, you need to learn to code. Or, get the right WordPress theme, which is not that easy as it sounds.
Here, in this detailed review, I will show you one minimal WordPress theme that will transform your content and make it shine. Yes, shine like a diamond.
I present to you: Typology – Text Based Minimal WordPress Blog Theme.
This theme is created for bloggers who don’t have time to design their sites. It’s for people who are looking for simple, yet powerful solutions for their content.
In this detailed review, I will show you the features of this theme and a step-by-step process to configure it.
Who Is This Theme For? And Is It For You?
Put simply, if you’re a blogger and your primarily writing content, I will highly encourage you to check Typology WordPress theme.
The authors of the theme, Meks, are advertising the theme as such that doesn’t even require featured images. it’s designed to really make your content great with the least amount of effort. Well, obviously you need to write the blog posts.
It’s probably the only theme on the market that is putting so much focus on the actual content. To be honest, it works.
Let me show you how we can install this theme and the main functionalities:
Installing Typology WordPress Theme
The installation process of the theme is quite similar to the other WordPress themes I’ve reviewed.
Once you get the theme and the files are downloaded locally on your computer, access your WordPress admin section > Go to Appearance > Themes Add New > Upload a theme > Install button:
The installation process will take a couple of seconds.
Activate the theme:
You’re all set.
Installing Typology Recommended Plugins And Demos
Once the theme is active on your WordPress website, you will get this notice inside your dashboard:
It will basically help you get started with the theme.
Let’s start going through the things the same order the authors of the theme advice: by installing the recommended plugins first:
Install Recommended Plugins
When you click on the Install Plugins button, you will see the following list of plugins ready for installation:
The list is quite large.
Let me add a few words for the plugins I think that
- Force Regenerate Thumbnails: This plugin allows you to delete all old images size and really regenerate the thumbnails for your image attachments.
- Meks Easy Ads Widget: This allows you can create an unlimited number of ads inside your WordPress widget. Plus additional options to customize ads for your needs.
- Meks Easy Instagram Widget: This allows you to implement your Instagram photos in your WordPress site.
- Meks Flexible Shortcodes: This plugin for those who want to add some nice additional elements inside their post/page content.
- Meks Smart Author Widget: Display your author/user profile info inside WordPress widget.
- Meks Smart Social Widget: Display more than 100 social icons inside WordPress widget.
- Meks Time Ago: This plugin will allow you to easily change your post date display to “time ago” format. For example, 1 hour ago, 2 weeks ago, 5 months, 4 days ago, etc… Several options are provided to suit your needs.
Of course, at any given moment you can disable or uninstall a plugin if you don’t think it’s necessary.
Next, installing the demo content:
Installing Demo Content
This process will make your WordPress installation look like the demo on the sales page:
You don’t necessarily have to do this. Only if you want to add the predefined settings by the authors of the theme.
So, click on Import Demo, this will lead you to the settings of the theme. You need to press the corresponding button next:
You just need to agree:
It took probably 3 seconds the screen to load.
We’re all set with the demo.
Getting Started With Typology WordPress Theme
Let’s first see what settings are included in this minimal WordPress theme.
I will go to the newly appeared menu inside the WordPress admin dashboard, called Theme Options:
Keep in mind that if you’re looking for more steps from the author of the theme you can press the Learn More button. This will lead you to their knowledge base site.
Dismiss the notice once you’re ready with this screen because it will only annoy.
Let’s start with the settings inside this page one by one:
Typology GENERAL SETTINGS
The Branding menu allows you to change the logo of the theme.
This section here has all the essential logo dimensions:
- Logo: The regular loge of your site
- Retina Logo (2x): Retina logo for retina displays.
- Custom logo URL: If you want to load logo from 3rd party page.
For now I’m going to use the logos from the demo content.
The next tab is the Styling & Colors section. A couple of really interesting things can be done here:
- Theme style: Choose how your content should appear over the header section where the image is usually placed. The actual image in this section explains it all.
- Header/cover background color: Obviously, the color of the background color.
- Header/cover gradient: You can make this gradient if you’re a fan.
- Cover background media: If you want, you can upload an image or a video that will appear instead of a simple colored background.
If you scroll a bit below, you have the option to change the color of your other elements of the site:
Basically, you can style every section of your site and assign different than the default color.
Header and Footer Settings
The next two tabs are holding the header and the footer options.
Inside the Header menu, you can choose what to include and also how the menu, logo, and the burger menu to be arranged.
Next, what header elements to include. As you will see, there are several:
- Main Navigation;
- Sidebar (hamburger icon);
- Search
dropdown ; - Social icons dropdown;
- Site description.
The hamburger icon, sidebar, allows you to add extra info
He will get to see this:
It’s cool to have this as an option. You can, for example, add links to your social media profiles.
In this section, you can also adjust the height of your header, whether or not to enable the sticky header and what would be the orientation.
Don’t forget to save when you make changes.
The footer menu is super straightforward, you select the layout and go to Appearance > Widgets to decide what to add.
Probably you will need only 1 column. It’s best to keep in clean and simple.
Additional Settings
Besides the basic settings we saw above, there are a couple of additional configurations that will help you tailor the theme to fit your needs.
I will start with the Typography section:
Decide what font you want for which section and do it. It’s that simple.
Once this is ready, you can fine-tune your typography by increasing or decreasing the font size of the different elements:
Ads section is where you can add banners inside your website. It’s really cool to promote a service or ad your affiliate links.
You can place the ads in the following places:
- Above the content
- Below the content;
- In between posts inside your blog section.
You can also block ads on specific pages and also on 404 pages if you like.
To upload an ad, simply type something or upload an image:
Once you save the changes and visit the page you will see this:
Cool, right?
Next, is the Misc. menu.
Few things to mention here:
- RTL mode option;
- More string is what to be displayed after
a excerpt of the article finishes. - Use built-in theme gallery or disable this if you’re using another solution.
- You can disable admin editor styling and
remove fonts and colors from Theme Options. This will speed up your site. - Display scroll-down arrow in cover. Really cool feature.
- Words to read per minute count. The count of each post, how many minutes you need to read it, is measured depending on the value you put here.
If you want to translate the theme, you can use the settings here: Typology Options > Translation.
All major elements can be easily translated from this section.
Finally, we have the performance section:
If you’re not using a specific element of the theme, it’s best to disable it. This will speed up your site.
Creating A Landing Page With Typology WordPress Theme
As I mentioned in the beginning, the theme includes only the basic options. By default, you can’t create a landing page, at least not the way you can with Elementor or Visual Composer plugins.
Still, the authors of the theme allow us to configure our Home Page.
To create a cool looking landing page with Typology theme, first create a new page and add appropriate text for your homepage:
Don’t make the text too long though.
Next, go to Settings > Reading > Set the page you want as a static homepage:
Once this is set, go back to the theme options and Home Page menu. Few things to consider here:
- Cover area displays: This here will say what to be displayed on your homepage. This is the reason I mentioned to make it short.
- Display dropcap if you want;
- Enable Cover section on first page only. Basically, if you don’t want this same piece of setup to be run on the other pages.
- Intro section displays: After the intro, you have the option to add a bit more text.
The theme is setup to display posts after what we have above.
The following section will allow you to tailor the posts that will be displayed along with what type of layout to have:
Save the options once you’re satisfied with the results and see what will happen:
The above is the main section and what you see below is what comes after first paragraph.
Pretty decent for a homepage created in less than 3 minutes.
Customizing Your Posts And Blog Section With Typology Theme
To be honest, Typology theme has one of the best blog layouts I’ve seen so far. It’s well arranged and it has
To setup the way your blog posts are arranged, go to Theme Options > Archive Templates:
You can choose from 3 different layouts.
Additionally, you can make a few modifications to the blog posts. If you access Single Post menu, you will see the following list of options:
- Whether or not to display the cover;
- To display the
dropcap ; - What meta data to be included in the posts;
- Should you, or should you not, display the featured image.
- Share buttons, the position of the buttons and also social media channels.
Also, there are a couple of options of the bottom of this section, how to display your related posts:
Once all is set, you site will look like this:
Well, it can look even better if you add
What Is The Price Of Typology WordPress Theme
The price of Typology theme is 59 USD. It’s a one time payment.
You get all the featured updates of the theme + 6 months of support.
Currently, this template has close to 1,800 downloads. Even though it’s not a lot compared to the big boys, it’s a decent amount of sales.
You can get the theme by going to this link.
Typology WordPress Theme Pros And Cons:
Pros:
- Clean and stylish;
- Super easy to configure;
- Unique looks;
- Social media buttons included;
- Only the essential options;
- Fast loading speed.
Cons:
- I believe it’s not 100% SEO ready. I was using the theme for a while and I was getting some errors inside my Google Webmaster Tools account;
- Even though I love the idea of only the essential features, it would be nice if they, the authors of the theme, allow you to create some kind of a landing page.
Final Thoughts
I absolutely love the theme. If you’re a blogger and if you don’t want to waste time configuring your site, you should definitely consider Typology. With just a few clicks you will be able to have everything ready for your content.
It’s an extremely beautiful theme that will surely WOW your visitors.
If you’re still looking for a theme and the content is the most important aspect of your site, give Typology a try.
I will love to hear your experience with this theme. Have you ever used Typology or the other themes created by Meks?