Spotlight is a premium WordPress theme designed by Mohsin Naqi of Blogging Bits and, Muhammad Haris. Newspaper themes are a tough genre, so let’s see how well it’s done.
This post was sponsored by Mohsin, but it’s going to be treated exactly like every other design review I write, so hopefully you’ll still learn from it even if you aren’t interested in getting a new theme!
The theme is sold through the newly launched Theme Sphere, and you can see a complete demo here.
What Has Been Done Well?
- Ample padding. Each element in the site is well spaced from it’s neighbors, which gives the site a very clean, calm look, and makes it far easier to read through.
- Easy to re-color. The majority of the site is colored in shades of gray, but there is still a very noticeable amount of red. By changing the link colors and footer border in the CSS, and updating just one image, the theme can be made unique instantly.
- Threaded comments. WordPress 2.7 is still very recent, so the number of places you find embedded comments in isn’t too high yet. It’s good to see the theme is up to date for it.
- Video embedding. If you look in the footer, you’ll find 4 embedded YouTube videos linked to their posts. If you publish a lot of videos on your site, this is a great feature that I haven’t seen before. You probably wouldn’t watch the videos in the small size, but the fact they’re there draws you to the full post.
- Navigation bars. Roll over both the top (red) navigation bar, and the slightly lower (gray) navigation bar. They both have great, different, rollover effects that could easily be made use of in a lot of theme designs. It could well be worth getting the theme just to get your hands on these.
What Could Be Improved?
- Logo. It’s difficult to create a logo in a template. You don’t know the name of the site that will be using it, or its topic, or anything at all. But still, the text used in the logo’s place here is a little boring. If you buy the theme though, it’s probably the first thing you will change anyway.
- Search bar. There’s nothing wrong with the current search bar, I’d just have used it a little differently. It fits nicely where it has been positioned, but is a search bar important enough to take up header space? What about an advert or RSS links? And the “Submit” button looks great, but a rollover effect for it would go down nicely as well.
- Featured post slider. The slider looks slick, contains an excerpt, has fluid animations, and most of all, the whole thing is a clickable link (Not all sliders are!). But there are no arrows for manually scrolling. It’s not a huge flaw, but it was a bit of an annoyance when you expect them to be there.
Conclusion
My conclusion is that Spotlight is a very well made theme, and definitely worth buying if you’re in the market for a new design. You might want to customize it a little to your liking, but that should be the case with all templates anyway!
It’s clean and well structured, which makes it a great base to build your own theme from. But between the touches of red and the navigation bars in particular, it has enough personality to make it that bit more noticeable than some of the other themes in the newspaper genre.
What do you think of Spotlight? Anything you’d like the authors to do with it?
If you’d like to purchase Spotlight, it can be bought here for just $30.
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Vincent Chow (5 comments)22 January 09
A great theme indeed. Daniel is running a contest giving this theme away at http://www.dailyblogtips.com/t.....ress-theme
I don’t know how they do it, but most paid themes have the premium feel on them.
Web Design Beach (31 comments)22 January 09
I like how theme is done also. The header also made negative effect at first look, especially with that basic search input field, but i think that is done with purpose for further customization and design of header which really must be done for any serious implementation of this theme.
Hussain M Elius (3 comments)22 January 09
This Theme looks amazingly similar to Gotham News From WooThemes : http://www.woothemes.com/demo/.....le=default
Muhammad Haris (2 comments)22 January 09
Thanks for the awesome review, Michael but you forgot to mention anything about theme backend and the powerful advertisement backend that comes with the theme.
All current and further suggestions will be implemented in the future themes released by theme sphere, we promise that. Keep them coming.
lotoli.net (1 comments)22 January 09
i like it.. it is awesome… wanna use it thanks
Mohsin (29 comments)22 January 09
Thanks for the review Michael. Though, you never mentioned its powerful backend.. but still appreciate the suggestions. We’ll try to implement your suggestions next time. (several kickass themes under production already)
Farid Hadi (15 comments)23 January 09
I would have liked to check this theme out but it seems like Theme Sphere is down. I’ll just have to come back and try later. Thanks for the review.
Muhammad Haris (2 comments)23 January 09
The server was down due to upgrade of server hardware. It is back online now.
Sorry for inconvenience.
Laurence Flynn (8 comments)23 January 09
What do I think?
Home Page: 2002 DHTML dropdown menu. Slider needs manual arrows like you said, the slider elements feels like it needs a heading. Adsense next to the slider? I don’t think so. Search box as you said positioned terribly. The Latest, Tags etc looks like it needs a background.
Also there’s no documentation, no screencasts selling the backend. The themesphere.com website itself is very lacking in many aspects.
My honest opinion? Pretty amateur. Sorry guys.
Mohsin (29 comments)23 January 09
Thanks for the critique Laurence.
1) Dropdown menus aren’t outdated on news/magazine style web sites.
2) Yes it does need the arrows, Suggestion already noted. But it doesn’t look all that bad without arrows either.
3) When it comes to AdSense, the higher the better. And what better place for ads is there than beside the featured content?
4) Well, again, the search bar can go anywhere depending on your personal preference or the niche of your site. We put it in the header because we really don’t think it’s that terrible of a idea
(BBC does that!)
5) I’d dismiss the tags needing a background as your personal preference (you can always customize a theme to your personal liking)
6) The documentation is included with the theme.
7) Theme Sphere is pretty much a one page site right now. We’ll be doing some overhaul as we launch more themes.
Thanks for your critique again. I hope everyone learns something from it.
redwall_hp (139 comments)23 January 09
“is a search bar important enough to take up header space?”
Yes, definitely. Searching is a very important function on a blog with a lot of content, and a function that should be displayed prominently.
Laurence Flynn (8 comments)24 January 09
I huge selling point with Premium themes are the screencasts by the developer showing how to implement all the built-in features. I strongly suggest you try this. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good first effort but just feels a bit incomplete. Michael knows how pedantic I can be with Wordpress themes. :p
I understand the top right is excellent real estate for ads and has the highest CTR. But if you must have it there at least put it in a separate cell. Having adsense in the same cell as the slider just feels wrong to me. You could even put feed subscribe info top right next to the slider with the adsense block under it. Also you could integrate the search in the nav bar and have the option to put banners or adsense in the header space. Giving the blogger full control over where they place ads in a theme would make the theme stand out in my opinion.
Crazy Oldie (3 comments)25 January 09
sweet template. once its tweek’d, it could really be a seller.
izzat aziz (3 comments)27 January 09
it nice theme to be said, but since it “premium template” you may need to put little extra in functioning, otherwise it only just like other free template. maybe need to work more on menu bar,
and try look at revolution theme i think they give good inspiration.
but good job anyway.
Odzyskiwanie danych (2 comments)28 January 09
A great looking template indeed. Simple, yet elegant. Includes all the necessary plugins. Plus it’s easily customizable. Generally 2 thumbs up, this is really a model template.
Snake (14 comments)9 February 09
The theme looks amazing!
logofrenzy (1 comments)11 February 09
The is theme is great. I wanna use it. You really made a theme that is easy to use and attractive. Thanks. Keep it up.
Mohit (2 comments)12 February 09
Awsome! theme. Want this theme for free.
Clue Design (1 comments)24 February 09
Nice work, wouldn’t take much to personalize this theme. Liked the video footer element, different.
Mulkazarus (1 comments)13 March 09
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dvdplayer (1 comments)11 August 09
thank you for your article, this is the good information
Banner Stands (4 comments)5 November 09
I love the theme great designing!
Rosario (12 comments)1 December 09
The theme look great
Banner Stands (4 comments)6 January 10
This theme is nice and clean and easy to read, job well done I think!
Pop Up Banner Stands (1 comments)7 January 10
nice layout – looks very scalable too! – nice simple colours – complely agree with clean designs – allows itself to be adapted very easily.
Pop Up Stands (1 comments)18 January 10
Too much bright colour and info going on is really not a great idea for a website. We get great feedback from our site which uses cool, clean colours.
Capacitive Switch (1 comments)6 February 10
another great themes, liked the threaded comment scheme. spotlight looks nice.
Furniture Lift (21 comments)28 February 10
Nice post, you have shown all the good in that theme and all the things that are not that good. Because of this kinds of reviews people are having paths or traces that they can use on their own work.
Ivan (2 comments)5 March 10
The theme is great. How can I have that theme? I’ll buy that
banner stands (4 comments)5 March 10
Nice theme. But isn’t it too heavy? Site will load slow because of the embeds and stuffs…
Study and Work Australia (27 comments)18 March 10
Does the ample padding is also what others call white spaces? I agree that the website is well spaced with each element that you can really distinguish each element.