We have thousands of themes freely available on WordPress. However, finding out a suitable theme for our site out of these is a tedious task. Most of the search results for the best WordPress theme provide a list of 10, 20, or even more themes. But, are you really interested in the ranking?
Most of the readers are looking for a single theme to try for their website. Further, they want a real experience of using a theme to pick it for their use.
- Want to safeguard your content?: Try this step to watermark your images and videos for free
In this article, I will share my experience of using a theme that stands out from the rest in terms of a rich UI, and on the top, it is free. It is to note that each user has a different taste and expectations for a theme. For that, this theme provides a relatively broad functionality to configure it. At the same time, I like to mention that this theme is not perfect. It has certain issues for which I will share few lines of code for workarounds.
Sparkling WordPress Theme
I am currently using this theme with some customization on top of it. To get a real feel of the theme, you can browse my site. To cut down on the details, I will list down the major features of it below:
1. Title of site and menu in the same header: Many themes, even my earlier theme GeneratePress, have a separate header for the Many themes, even my earlier theme GeneratePress, have a separate header for the title of site and menu. However, they take up significant space on mobile devices. This leaves little space for AdSense monetization below the headers. I like to highlight that the place below the header section is very prominent for ads and leads to an increase in earnings. title of site and menu. However, they take up significant space on mobile devices. For AdSense monetization of website, place below the header is a very prominent and pays higher value.
2. Logo upload: We can upload an image in the header to act as a logo.
3. Background image: The theme provides a feature to upload an image or solid color as a background.
4. Easy switch over: When I initially changed the theme to Sparkling, the new theme took so well all the items from the previous theme that I hardly had to make any changes.
5. Customization: Several options are available to customize the theme under Appearance -> Customize.
6. Support: Excellent support is available at Colorlib support website.
During the use of the theme, I observed certain issues with the theme that I will discuss next. At the same time, I will also provide simple workarounds for them.
Custom Menu on Mobile
I am using a custom menu rather than the default theme menu. If you like to know the benefits of that, please read
On mobile devices, the custom navigation menu has an issue with the theme that items in the dropdown menu are not visible. However, the issue is not there on the desktop.
However, there is an easy workaround available for the problem. From the dashboard, visit Appearance -> Additional CSS and place the following code (Source: Colorlib support)
@media (max-width: 767px){
.navbar-default .navbar-nav .open .dropdown-menu > li > a,
.dropdown-menu > li > a {
color: #f5f7fa;
}
}In the above code, one can just change the color code to customize the color of the dropdown menu items.
Weak Color in Sidebar Blocks
The Sparkling theme has an issue that the sidebar blocks have weak colors for texts and links that are hardly visible. Further, no option is available in the theme customizer to change the colors in the sidebar. Don’t worry! We can add a small CSS code to change the colors as per our liking. The code is to be added under Appearance -> Additional CSS.
- To change URL color in the sidebar (source: Colorlib support)
#secondary .widget a {
color: #555;
}- To change text color in the sidebar
#secondary .widget {
color: #888;
}- To change color of titles in the sidebar
#secondary .widget h3 {
color: #000;
}Summary
So, I shared my personal experience with the theme Sparkling in this post and discussed various available features. I also talked about few issues with it and presented simple workarounds to solve them. The theme has excellent support available from Colorlib, and I am sure you will enjoy using it. If you’ve any queries, suggestions, or feedback on the topic, please leave a comment. Goodbye!