I had a lot of fun this weekend testing out Mary Ellen, a gorgeous theme by the brand new company, Coded Creative. The screenshots here are the theme installed on my testing site, and you’re going to see some silly content language. But the reason that silly text is there, is because when I test out themes, I test them out to the max.
As a web designer and WordPress developer, it’s my job to keep up with design trends and to find gorgeous themes my clients will love. And a part of that is to spend some of the business’ money on themes to test (or as we web designers call it, QA). I take a theme I think many of my potential clients would love, and I buy the theme and test everything. The links, the plugins, the customization dashboard, the newsletter design, how it looks on different mobile devices, how it looks in a preview window from a social media link. I mean everything.
Mary Ellen is a gorgeous theme that is extremely easy for non-tech savvy people to customize. The real crowd pleaser is the ability to change fonts by just typing in the font you want. Amazing. This theme impressed me so much that I reached out to the creators and I became one of the first affiliates for them—I knew I’d have a lot of clients who would want their themes.
The only downside to this theme that I could find was that you’re on your own with the newsletter section. You can see in the screenshot below, my quick and easy Convertkit code plopped into the footer doesn’t align well with the neighboring text. This is the only spot in the theme that my clients would need to hire me to do some web design work to make sure their newsletter call to action looks great.
Overall, this is an astoundingly great theme at a reasonable price. If you want to grab this theme for yourself, follow this link to get the theme. And if you need someone to style the newsletter section for you, just ask! I can style it quickly at a keep-money-in-your-pocket price.
Thank you so much for this writeup Sarah, it’s sooo good to know that you enjoyed our theme and found it easy to work with. That’s exactly what we were hoping for!
The opt-in forms are something we debated with, but because every provider styles their forms differently we decided to just support the Genesis eNews Extended plugin for newsletter signups. But now I sorta want to go back through and update everything for the different providers! Haha
And I totally love your demo content. Way too entertaining 😀
Thanks again!
Good post.