As you may, or may not know, I have a collaborative blog called Living With Special Needs. I had it running on a news/magazine theme that I liked very much but always found to be somewhat offbalanced. I decided that I wanted to find a more balanced theme to put on the site for the new year. After looking at lots of themes I decided upon the Big News premium theme from Blog Oh Blog. I’d used some of his free themes in the past and had been very pleased.
Big News was easy to install. Once installed you need to set the appearance of the home page up, most of which is done right from within your WordPress dashboard. The theme is an SEO-optimized magazine theme where the home page is divided into three columns. Each column contains blocks of posts from different categories, which you select. You can choose how many posts go into the blocks and even how many images appear there as well. At the top of the theme category menus appear. You can create menus and choose what appears in what menu from within your dashboard. Below the menus there is a news ticker that you can activate, or not. You choose what one category will have it’s posts appear in the ticker. In the top block of the upper left column is a featured post slideshow carousel. You choose what one category has it’s posts featured. I created a category called Featured, so that content in the slideshow could be refreshed frequently with little effort.
Once you’re finished setting the layout up you can tweak the colors of the site. All of the colors used in the theme can be changed from the dashboard, from background to text to links to menu colors. Then you can add your social networking info in the dashboard, making the built in RSS feed, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn icons usable.
Now that the home page is set up you can set up things that will effect the look of a single page. The theme has built in gravatar support, so gone are the days of adding that code in manually or by widget. You can choose to display or hide comments and conversation with the click of one button at the bottom of a post. Sexy bookmarks is built in, making it easy for readers to share your content and easy for your content to be shared.
So the theme’s installed and here’s my thoughts on what I don’t like.
- Widgets don’t work “out of the box”. They will work on a blog page but not on the main page.
- RSS feed for each category. This just doesn’t work for a multi-author blog. I would have liked to have seen an easier way to remove the RSS feed icon from the blocks on the front page besides going into the code for each one. Or, an easy way to change it to an RSS feed for each author.
Other than that I love the theme.
The Big News theme is available for purchase online. A single-user license is $49.99 and a developer License is $150.00.
