SocialNow is one of the newest themes from the WordPress plugin in and theme developers at mythemeshop.com They have become one of our go to sources for themes for client sites here at natural choice. Why? Three essential needs for any site design/development.
- Quality. All the themes from mythemeshop.com are high quality well written and light weight, and incorporate the latest web 2.0 features. Even their free themes.
- Cost. Even though the quality of their themes is high they are reasonably priced. That allows us to design affordable, highly customizable web sites for our clients.
- Support. mythemshop.com offers some of the best support around. Support tickets are responded to quickly and thorough solutions to problems with purchased themes or plugins are provided.
We already use several mythemeshop.com themes on our sites as well as those of our client sites. So when we got the opportunity review the SocialNow theme we were excited to have the opportunity to share our thoughts with our readers. So on to the review.
SocialNow
We installed the SocialNow theme on our test site where we test out new themes and plugins before we implement for our clients.Installation is simple using the standard WordPress theme manual install to upload the zip file from MyThemeShop and activate once installed. The magic starts once the theme is installed. There is an option to import theme options, starter content and even widgets to configure the site in a snap. The options included are the default, site configuration, and fashion, health, or news, or viral site configuration and look like one of the several options demonstrated by MyThemeShop on their site. We chose the viral configuration for our review site. You can choose to import only the configuration options, the options and widgets, or everything including the starter content. This gives an easy way to see what the site will could like with content and the opportunity to quickly customize a base configuration to suit your needs. Once the you are ready to add your own content the imported content can be removed with a single click.
SocialNow – social media
Everyone knows that social media is critical to connecting in the digital age. But the content that can be shared on social media is limited so web sites will never be replaced by social media. What is needed is a way to connect social media and web sites seamlessly to engage visitors and draw them to your site and convert web site visitors into social media followers. SocialNow is designed to use your web site in conjunction with your social media accounts to maximize your content for the greatest impact. This marketing concept called spiral branding in the ad industry is an essential tool for the digital age. The SocialNow theme makes it easy to share your social media accounts on a web site. It has several tools that makes it easy to not only add your accounts but determine where and how they are displayed.
SocialNow – social content
What good is social media and great content if no one reads it. The SocialNow theme does a fantastic job of presenting content in an engaging way with a stylish modern look and feel. This is one of the things we like the most about this theme. It is clear a lot of attention was paid to content display. One of our favorite features is the featured image sliders and parallax/zoom out featured images. This puts the ability to feature content in a visually appealing way at our finger tips. Creating eye-catching content display couldn’t be easier. The homepage slider can be turned on and configured with a couple of clicks to show a beautiful full width slider to display chosen content categories.
Another great looking feature we like is the styling of the comment/discussion box. Its formatting is inviting and engaging and promotes interaction. The built-in rating and social media sharing will certainly help to build community and give content the opportunity to go viral. The built-in related articles helps make you content sticky being visitors on your site longer and giving them more to share on social media.
One essential necessity for any modern theme is responsive display. That means the theme will display content differently based on the kind of the device being used to view it. So whether a site is viewed a mobile phone, a tablet or a desktop/laptop computer information should as easy to access and fit the viewing available area. SocialNow absolutely shines in this area.
site viewed on iphone
Beyond the built-in theme options which allows aspects of the theme to be quickly changed and customized, SocialNow “ships” with several free plugins that makes it easy to customize a web site so it doesn’t look generic. In addition there are many built-in options to get the maximum impact for your site. This includes customized home page display, ad management, typography options and fine-tuning header/footer options. This theme has so many features not found in other themes like built-in optimizations to so sites load more quickly.
Overall we really like this new addition to the MyThemeShop stable of themes. It is definitely a theme that we could recommend for a client or see ourselves using on one of our sites. The look and feel reflects the modern web and it has the necessary web 2.0 features one would expect in a top quality theme. The easily customizable features of the theme gives it a 4.5 out of 5 rating in our book. The solid support from MyThemeShop makes it a solid choice. If there was one omission we would like to see implemented for even more flexibility is content display is WordPress post formats, that would bump our 4+ rating to solid 5.
Naturel Choice is a mythemeshop.com affiliate.
