Expert Review
WordPress has grown up so fast and vast that whichever website you want to create just think of the relevant theme category, type it on Search engine and you will get a full-fledged list of themes in few clicks. There are plenty of theme clubs and theme developers across the world making awesome themes for passionate theme users. I am one of them! I love searching and using different types of themes. This time I was searching for WordPress Church related themes and found “EXODUS“. Here is my short review on this theme.
Design:
Exodus is built in such a way that it will meet all needs of a Church website. The theme has option to choose between two color schemes namely light & dark. Supports google fonts, several options for header settings like search, second menu, latest events, sermons or posts, tagline, custom content, etc., breadcrumbs supported for better navigation. So design and look wise this theme is awesome. It comes with plenty of options and is great theme for developers that have great sense of designing as well.
Ease of Customization:
On activating this theme you get a notice to install Church Theme Content plugin. Activate it and you will be ready to go with this theme. You will get all its customizing options in Appearance => Customize. All the options in live customizer is an indication that it follows all new WordPress standards. Then you get 4 Custom post types namely Sermons, Events, People and Locations. Sermons custom post type has 5 taxonomies for sermon page namely Topics, Books, Series, speakers and sermon tags. Here is a brief description of all the theme options, customizer options:
Page and Post options:
- Colors & Styling: Change color schemes, main colors, link colors, etc.
- Google fonts: Change logo font, tagline font, menu font, heading font, body fonts and apply character sets.
- Top bar: There is a top most bar position in theme structure where you can show/hide options listed in these settings. It gives you option to choose upcoming events, latest sermons, latest posts, tagline, custom content or nothing to show on top bar. Also you can choose top bar content position from here.
- Header logo: Choose logo type – image/text, logo text custom box, logo text size, show something on right of logo, Show breadcrumb path on subpages, etc.
- Footer content: Show/hide location, copyright text.
- Social media icons: Show social media icons in header and footer by putting urls in the text boxes given here.
- Homepage slider: Make it auto or manual and change transition time from here.
- Widgets: It provides you with several widgets like CT archives(Monthly archive for chosen post type), CT categories(Shows categories of various types), CT events(Shows upcoming or past events), CT galleries(Shows list of gallery pages), CT gallery(Shows gallery thumbnails), CT giving (Shows a message and button), CT highlight(Shows a highlight), CT locations(Shows church location(s)), CT People(Shows people according to options), CT Posts(Shows blog posts according to options), CT Sermons, CT slide(A slide to be shown in a slider).
- Widgetized areas(sidebars):
- Homepage slider – Add CT slide widget to add slides to this slider. It allows you to add image and video as well.
- Homepage highlights – Add widgets here to show on the homepage below slider and intro.
- Homepage bottom left – These show at the bottom-left of the homepage.
- Homepage bottom right – These show at the bottom-right of the homepage.
- Page sidebar – These widgets show on the side of pages using the default template.
- Sermons sidebar – These widgets show on the side of sermon pages.
- Events sidebar – These widgets show on the side of event pages.
- People sidebar – These widgets show on the side of people pages.
- Locations sidebar – These widgets show on the side of locations content.
- Gallery sidebar – These widgets show on the side of gallery pages.
- Blog sidebar – These widgets show on the side of blog content.
- Contact sidebar – These widgets show on the side of the contact page.
- Search sidebar – These widgets show on the side of search results.
Responsiveness:
This theme is 100% responsive and retina ready to all devices ranging from desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile phones to iPads, iPhones. The content gets automatically adjusted according to the screen size it is being viewed upon.
Page load speed:
A Church website may contain lot of heavy content and media like images, audios, video, pdf files. This may impact the page load speed. The PageSpeed score depends on the demo page content, caching of the page, number of HTTP requests, Image sizes and lot many other parameters. I checked the Google PageSpeed of EXODUS official demo on Mobile and Desktop mode. The Performance is not impressive on both the devices. It is recommended to use W3 Total Cache and WP Super cache plugins for speeding up sites.
[visualizer id=”23610″]
Search Engine Optimization:
Basic search engine optimization is done such as,
- On Single Post, the title is in <H1> tag
- In-built breadcrumbs available for better navigation for Search bot.
It is advised to use Yoast SEO WordPress plugin for even better SEO for the site.
Theme Authenticity:
I have scanned this theme with TAC plugin for authenticity and with Theme Check plugin for WordPress standards of theme code, the result is as shown below:
This theme has passed TAC test but theme checker has given lot of warnings which needs to be resolved.
Support and help:
Support by churchthemes.com is for a period of one year from date of purchase of theme. Email support is also provided by them for one on one communication. It provides a set of guides and video tutorials to build site with churchthemes.com.
Special features:
- 4 Custom post types supported.
- Several page templates namely Default Template, Blog, Contact, Events – Calendar, Events – Past, Events – Upcoming, Galleries, Gallery, Homepage, Locations, People, Sermons.
- Several widgets and widgetized sidebar included.
Conclusion:
For Church website it is an awesome theme with loads of features in one. One can easily build a heavy content Church website with this theme.
Pros:
- Several options for page layouts and widgets.
- Slider is integrated within the theme.
- It is a translation ready theme.
- Supports child theme.
Cons:
- Does not provide page builder.
- No custom CSS box, custom code box.
$99.00Visit official site
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