Design Review: eBusiness from Elegant Themes
36eBusiness is the latest theme release from Elegant Themes. We’re going to take a look at it, what it’s done well and what not so well, and what we can learn from it.
eBusiness comes in 3 color schemes and features quite a lot of JavaScript usage. Fire up the demo in a new tab as we look at the theme in more detail.
Before we start though; Nick from Elegant Themes sponsored this post, but there are no affiliate links so there is no advantage to me in telling you to buy the theme. We’ll just be taking a look at it from a design point of view and if you’d like to buy it for your own site, the details will be at the end of the post.
What Has Been Done Well?
- Header design – The header is very strong and distinctive. The blog title has been highlighted and because the theme comes with PSDs, anyone could edit this to their blog’s name and never need a separate logo.
The header navigation has also been done very well, clean but noticeable. The real win for the header though is that it does all this without overpowering the rest of the page.
- JavaScript Navigation Effects – Mouseover the 3 tabs on the home page and you’ll find they slide up and down. Do the same with the About link in the header and you’ll see a lovely nav-bubble fades in. These effects are simple but elegant, exactly the way a JavaScript effect should be.
- Sliding Blog Entries – The eBusiness theme is about business first and blogging second. The homepage features a great little box that pulls in the latest blog entries and displays them in a very concise, easy-to-use, slider. This same effect could easily be used on a regular blog to pull in featured posts or a certain category.
- Wide variety of color. The background is light brown, the footer is dark brown, the header is orange, the content is somewhere between yellow and brown and the sidebar is green. That’s a great variety of color, and it all works well together.
And proving that a design isn’t dependent on the colors it was first designed with, it still looks great in the other colorful variations! Check out eBusiness Smooth and eBusiness Radiate to see.
- Detailed comment designs – Quite often the comments in a theme don’t get a lot of thought put into them and you end up with plain rectangles and leave it at that. The eBusiness comments use textures like the page background, colors from the rest of the site, gravatars and a great threading effect.
What Could Be Done Better?
- Where do I click? – It can take a few tries at first to work out where to click on the home page. The “Read More” button in the sliding panels makes sense when you think about it of course, but my first attempts were on the panel’s title and then on the large image. I also tried clicking the orange banner further down the page later because it stood out as different from the brown one above it.
A wide variety of color is great and the design effects here are fantastic, but you have to be careful not to let that get in the way of easy browsing. A few small changes/extra links here could go a long way.
- Banners that stand out too well – The orange banners beneath the post title and commenter names look fantastic, but they almost stand out too well. Load up a post page and what do you notice first? The post title or the text in the banner?
The banners are one of the nicest design touches in the site, but if I were to use this theme I’d consider making them smaller, or changing the information in them to something more important. Maybe even your post tags for the post one and the commenter’s URL in the comments one?
NB – The 2 points above may be unfairly influenced by the fact this is a sample site with dummy content. The whole idea behind lorum ipsum text is that you aren’t supposed to notice it. The effect could well be much less on a title using real words.
Conclusion
You could probably tell this from the first glance, but I’ll say it anyway; eBusiness is a beautiful theme. There isn’t one inch of the site that hasn’t been well thought about. The 2 flaws I commented on aren’t major flaws and definitely open to interpretation.
If I had to sum up what makes eBusiness great in one line it would be that it has combined a creative but restrained use of JavaScript with a beautiful design. That’s something we could all try to do more.
Get eBusiness For Yourself
eBusiness has just been released as the latest addition to the Elegant Themes themes club. To get it, unlimited access to 22 other gorgeous themes and everything Nick makes for the next year costs just $19.95.
Click here to see the sign-up page and get your hands on the files now.
Let us know what you think of eBusiness here. Love it or hate it?
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I just *love* every theme nick puts out. Great price, great themes, they look good and are well-done in the backend.
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Hey Michael!
I have been a member of Elegant Themes since reading a previous review you did. I really like eBusiness, but I recently purchased Thesis so I am having a hard time justifying *NOT* using it since it costs a pretty penny… I happen to be pleased with my Thesis design (simple and effective).
eBusiness is great looking though and I may use it for some side projects I am working on.
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This is a great theme. One of my favorite elegant themes yet. :)
I really like eBusiness Radiate. It looks great.
I didn’t really like the “Read more” link in Radiate though, the one in the original is better.
The top right rounded corner looks a bit off, apart from that I don’t have any complaints :)
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Very nice theme, but it price too high for theme like this…
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Indeed it’s a great theme. Congrats to the designer. The only thing i would change at the first sight, is design of dynamic sub menu that is popping out. As main menu items are rounded, i would change the footer of the sub menu to be also rounded, just as like the header is…
Love the new theme! The navigation effects on the tabs are really cool. The effects are subtle but really help in enhancing the elegance of the theme. I agree the colors work well together and complement each other, not boring, and not too loud at all. Thanks!
I read this review with trepidation… because eBusiness is the theme I am going to use for my CMS wordpress site.
When I first saw the theme, I thought that it was stunning, as you say, every detail has been thought out.
The other thing that I liked was that it had been produced specifically as a CMS. I know we can all set up our own static pages… but this theme appears to be ahead of most in its approach to CMS.
I also prefer this to free themes because there is a help forum, just in case I need a little advice.
Just joined Elegant themes and am busy setting up the eBusiness theme on a local XAMPP setup.
The theme is super easy to setup and the documentation and videos that members can access make everything very easy.
For $20 membership… this theme is worth every penny, or should I say every cent.
[…] Themes (Who we have reviewed before) are one of the top premium themes sites around and have just recreated their options page […]
Great theme, one of my favorite
Elegant themes are really cool. Great price, this theme is worth every penny, they look good and are well-done.
Yeah only $20 to get all their themes for a year! Thats less than most themes costs alone. And they are far more pro then alot what’s around. Anyways great theme I love it. Thanks for the review!
Yes mate, themes even on deviantart are more expensive.
does anyone know how to add a video in the main slider on the homepage like that?
Yet another amazing theme from Elegantthemes! Keep it up Nick!
Yeah your right it really have a cool header and the navigation bar too. These are one the things a design must good of.
Thanks for your review.
I like the header , clear and cool , like leather effect.
Amazing theme ever i see. Header is so clear and cool. leather effects make it more artistic. Thank you
The other thing that I liked was that it had been produced specifically as a CMS
I usually do go through the spam filter, so even the simple fact you have a Gravatar will help any future comments of yours stand out for me
based on the photoshop default picker. But you can use it to create color palettes and save them for future use. Also, you can download the palettes that you create as
.Maybe you can do more for or attention our government for get green responsibility, because many forest in our country was destruct and damage, because our country more help for keep green!!
The stitched theme is gorgeous! Thanks!
The themes are really elegant and stylish even though the designs are simple and not that very colorful. It is better compared to the other themes that are exaggerated.
I really like the theme, is elegant.
think some of these are pretty average and shouldn’t even be on a list of STUNNING photography
Been a member on elegant themes for a while now , great themes for the money and so easy to use and well coded .
The simple fact you have a Gravatar will help any future comments of yours stand out for me!!
This article gives the light in which we can observe the reality. This is very nice one and gives in depth information. Thanks
This is a great theme. It just makes everything flow together nice and smoothly. Keep up the good work!
I really like it, thank you for your post.
this is a nice site. and your post is really interesting. i would surely come back for more of your posts. thanks!
A really nice review and a nice theme that I would definitely take inspiration from. To be able to create a theme like this a lot of thought has to be put into it and I think looking at the link and the small amount of criticisms highlighted in this blog shows that this is definitely something that people should be considering to use themselves!
How i create a white box with the green rectangle in title?
It´s a shortcode, right? Thanks