Theme Review: FlashWP

This site uses the FlashWP theme. It’s got the following advantages:

• It has a sticky menu. Two menus in fact.
• It has a clean look.
• The header doesn’t take up a lot of space (unless you deliberately make it do so).
• The sidebar, if you choose to display one, remains on screen as you scroll, so you’re not wasting that space as you scroll past the first screen of a long page.
• There are widget areas all over the place. Here’s a sample page with all the widget areas highlighted in red. Besides the 11 widget areas shown here, there are a couple that appear only on the home page, so a total of 13. Having had to struggle to get widgets where I want them on some sites, this is a feature I greatly value.

Disadvantages:

• Custom CSS is needed to make it the way you want because there aren’t a lot of appearance-based options. For instance, you can have a header image, but you can’t have your site title and tagline overlaid on the header image unless you code this with CSS.
• There’s no way to put a search field on the menu bar or to have it in the header but not taking up a whole line of screen space (again, unless you know some CSS).
• There’s no option to use the full screen width or to control how wide the left and right margins of the page are.
• There are no font options.

They have a paid version that addresses a lot of these issues. So bottom line, it’s a nice theme provided you know enough CSS to adjust the things they don’t provide a way to adjust, or are willing to shell out for the version with a reasonable number of options.

Like most themes, this one has a footer giving credit to the theme developers. They deserve credit, but look, I’m writing a nice review of their theme and will also review them on WordPress.org, so I feel justified in blocking out the credit line in the footer. For this, I use the plugin Real-Time Find and Replace to substitute for the string:

<p class='flashwp-credit'><a href="https://themesdna.com/">Design by ThemesDNA.com</a></p>

and replace it with nothing. A CSS rule would probably serve the purpose instead.