Personal Theme Review: A WordPress Theme For Bloggers Who Get Personal

Joel from BlogTechGuy.com is fast becoming one of the best WordPress experts around. He has already reviewed two premium WordPress themes on my blog, so when Kevin Muldoon offered a review copy of his theme, Joel was happy to check it out and then write this review. Here’s what Joel thinks of the “Personal Theme” for WordPress…

What is the Personal Theme?

Personal Theme is brought to us by Kevin Muldoon of Blogging Tips.

Themes that are paid for are often called Premium Themes, and usually offer distinct advantages to free themes available. They may have different color schemes and/or design layouts built in. They usually have an options admin menu that allows you to add, remove or change features of the theme without the need for any HTML, CSS or PHP knowledge.

As the theme author is getting paid for their work they will often spend more time fixing any errors or problems that get reported with their theme, there is often documentation, and in a lot of cases support forums in case you get stuck or need to solve a difficult layout problem.

Some free themes are well supported and have similar features to some premium themes (Atahualpa and Thematic come to mind) and there are many free and premium themes available, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, so let’s take a look at what makes this theme unique.

What Is Under The Hood?

This WordPress theme was designed specifically for personal blogs and comes with 10 color schemes to choose from, though users can easily change the background image or background color.

Installation is a straightforward as possible for a premium theme. It can be done by uploading the zip file in your WordPress dashboard via Plugins > Add new, or you can unzip into a folder and upload to your wp-content/themes folder via FTP if you prefer. You don’t need to do anything further besides activating it, no file permissions need to be messed with.

Personal Theme comes with an admin options area in which you can do many things. This short video I put together for you below will take you through most of these options, so watch it now for the details…

The ability to easily add social bookmarking icons is a nice idea, plus the Feedburner subscription box, author image and bio section add some nice touches. Other options are pretty standard, such as excluding menu items, changing fonts and an archives page.

What Could be Improved?

On the theme menu options page, a floating save button or a save button in each menu section would be useful for someone (like me) who likes to play around with the options, rather than having to scroll down to the bottom each time. Plus I always advocate moving the Save and the Cancel/Reset button as far away from each other as possible, as it is a constant source of frustration with themes and plugins that put the almost identical looking option buttons next to each other.

I would have liked to see some more options in the admin panel too. Being able to define categories to be displayed on the menu would be very useful, a featured post section (though the custom layout seems to kind of do this), and automatic thumbnail image creation is rapidly being standard too, so that would be great. Perhaps it’s a lot to ask for, but with the competition offering these features and more there needs to be more functionality and flexibility to compete.

For the option to exclude pages from the header I would have preferred a selectable list of current Page names, as getting the Page ID, especially for new bloggers, is a challenge in itself and can easily be prevented. Also the option for the header menu links is to exclude Pages, while the option for Pages in the footer is to include the Pages – this could be a little confusing, if you’re not confused already!

The image uploader seemed to be “wobbly” for me too, adding /demo/ in front of the path to my uploaded image. This may have been fixed in a later release than I have, and was easy to correct at my end, but shouldn’t occur.

In terms of design, the options are nicely varied and leave room for customization. The layout isn’t quite to my particular taste, in terms of the blog posts being separated with the background showing through, but these things are very much down to personal style. I do like how the menu tabs are displayed and the comments “balloon” and the theme is very neat and clean.

How Good Is The Support?

You get lifetime support for the theme, but what does that entail? Essentially the forum, which seemed to be well staffed with prompt responses and personal involvement by Kevin when I searched it. The forum seemed open to be read even by non-purchasers which can be useful especially for people like me, who may be working on the theme but not privy to the client’s forum access details.

The FAQ is fairly brief, but the theme is easy to set up and get going, plus the forum covers many other questions that may arise.
(From Yaro: Kevin very recently sold his BloggingTips.com blog to a new owner, which I believe includes management of this theme too, so you should check out who is providing support for Personal Theme before you buy it.)

How Much Does It Cost?

For a premium theme, the price is reasonable at $49.95, especially when you consider the license.

The good news about this theme, is unlike some other restrictive licenses on premium themes you are permitted to use this theme on as many domains you own. Also, as you would hope (and these days expect) you will also get free lifetime upgrades for this theme. There is only the one license type and so covers anyone who would need it for personal or business use.

Should You Fork Out For This Theme?

The Personal Theme is on par with the very best of the free themes available, and I often think that those authors should charge for their work. $49.95 however seems a little over-priced to me, $10 cheaper would make it seem more value for money.

While I know first hand how much work has to go in to create a theme of this standard, there is stiff competition from some free themes mentioned previously, and premium themes like Woo Themes offering similar features with a much wider range for a lower price (though you do have to purchase 3 at a time, but it is only $20 more).

By far the two most popular themes (free or premium) that I’m using for clients at Blog Tech Guy are Headway which offers a much more customizable theme for only $37 more than the Personal Theme, and Thesis is another excellent choice for the same extra cost.

Thesis requires more HTML and CSS knowledge to get looking the way you require, but both are very powerful themes for not a lot more. However the licenses are more restrictive, limiting the installations to two (Headway) or one (Thesis), unless you have a Developer license and then there is still a per-website license fee.

Personal Theme is still attractive for someone who wants to be able to take the next step over a free theme, or is looking for a premium theme that has a fair number of features and can be used on an unlimited number of websites. The license terms make that price a lot lower if you use it on multiple websites.

However it is not really suitable for business blogging, though it can be made to fit that purpose of course, it seems geared mainly towards general blogging, hence the name Personal Theme. For that it is a pretty average choice, and fits in a gap between completely free and higher priced premium themes.

You can check out Personal Theme via our affiliate link here – Personal Theme and also demo the theme here.

Joel Williams