Bridge Theme Review

Bridge is a creative multi-purpose WordPress theme released in 2014 by Qode Themes, an Envato Power Elite author. Part of an extensive portfolio, Bridge is a powerful and friendly template designed to help you create a remarkable website.

Design

With a minimal design and a top level of customization, Bridge was created to give you a great start for a professional looking website.

With various features, a multitude of layouts and pre-made demos, this theme radiates playfulness, inviting you to discover your online identity. This is a highly flexible theme that can be a good choice for travel, e-commerce, fashion, IT, food, architecture websites and everything in between.

With the one-click ‘Qode Import’ option, you get access to over 200 demos that can be installed with content or just as a design and widgets. The Bridge theme allows you to draw your visitor’s attention using beautiful sliders, animation effects and lots of infographic elements.

Bridge’s authors have added animation styles to their creative menus. Starting with the design, up to behavior, you can choose the full-screen menu which is a delight. You can open a full-screen navigation from a menu and choose its style. To add more visibility to the portfolio pages you can use a specially designed left menu, that lets your visitors make abstraction of the navigation elements and focus on the beautiful imagery.

If you are interested in navigation elements, in the ‘wide with icons’ option, you can assign a representative icon to each page, post, link or category name and make the sticky menu a visual guide through your website’s content.

Loaded with six blog layouts, and eight portfolio types, Bridge will enhance your website with style. Images and videos can be displayed in a most alluring way if you enable the lightbox effect, or set both of them as background.

Qode author developed the ‘Passepartout Border’ option to provide a nice framework to your website. The word ‘passepartout’ has a French origin and it refers to the framing procedure in which a picture is attached to a paper or piece of material and placed behind glass. The developers transformed this concept into a nice revealing feature that makes your website stand out from the crowd.

You can choose your header section to be light, dark, transparent and set one of the eight styles available. The header search bar can slide from different angles, cover the whole top section or display in full-screen mode.

A Google Fonts list is available, and you can select a different font for each section of the website or use a global font to embrace all posts and pages. ‘Font Awesome’ and ‘Font Elegant’ are two icon packages that come with the theme. You can place them everywhere to highlight your content.

The Bridge theme comes with ‘Qode Social Icon’ and ‘Instagram’ custom widgets, and 28 already-built widget areas. If you want to use sidebars on your website, note that they cannot be sticky, and there is no option to show dual sidebars at the same time.

Bridge offers a smooth page scroll that can be enabled for a ‘One Page Layout’ or as a ‘Landing page’.  You can use the ‘One Page Layout’ for a single website page and you can choose from a default or a full width template. The ‘Landing Page’ defines the page entrance, maintenance or a pre-launch announcement. The header and footer sections will not be displayed if the Landing Page is enabled.

The theme is responsive and retina ready to make the visitor’s experience more engaging on small screen devices.

Functionality

Bridge has a lot of features and settings that are divided into 20 sections and can be applied globally from the Qode Option panel located in the WordPress admin area. From here you can add many elements like Separators, Buttons, Message Boxes, Blockquote, Testimonials, Counters, Progress Bars, Pie Charts, Tabs, Slider Navigation Interface, and more. You can choose a different style, color, and position for each of those elements.

The Bridge theme allows you to create beautiful video sliders.

The ‘Qode Slider’ is a custom feature specially designed for self-hosted videos. If you want to include YouTube or Vimeo based videos and create beautiful slides, you have to add them to the premium Layer Slider plugin.

Another premium tool wrapped with this template is the Visual Composer plugin. This page builder lets you drag and drop whatever elements you want to create beautiful pages or posts. The ‘Qode Carousel’ is a useful custom feature. You can create beautiful imagery or product sliders using this feature which is compatible with the WooCommerce plugin.

The Bridge theme comes with 16 predefined page templates. You can create pages and posts using Visual Composer or the custom shortcodes. The template’s author recommends customers to use the builder for pages and create posts using the shortcodes.

There is a single post template, but the various post formats like the gallery, video or link, can be used to create compelling content. The Bridge theme allows you to style your website by adding a different background color for every post or page.

This theme supports RTL writing system. The template is compatible with the WPML premium plugin and comes with .po and .mo translation files.

Performance

We have tested Bridge’s default demo on different page speed tests, and the content loads with a medium speed.

Downsides

It may not be handy for users to reset the WordPress and upload the theme again if they want to switch between demos. The author explains in the theme’s documentation that when you import another demo, the data will overwrite and the user will lose his work.

Bridge comes with a shortcode for custom fonts, and you can easily integrate them into pages or posts. This custom fonts shortcode could be inconvenient because it means that you cannot add custom fonts on menus, blocks or sidebars.

In the Qode Options panel, there is always a sticky ‘scroll-to’ section placed at the bottom of the page without a disable function that may cause usability issues; it restricts the settings overview on small devices.