Composer is a premium WordPress theme built for business, personal, portfolio, or creative websites. Developed by the Innwit in September 2016, Composer is a nice theme packed with many features. From a restaurant, wedding, medical, business, architecture to a travel website, this theme is ready to give you a quick start with over 68 pre-made demo pages.
Design
Composer is an elegant, responsive and retina ready template built on the Bootstrap framework. Starting with above the fold and ending with the bottom section, this theme makes your website highly customizable. You have ten menu layouts, plenty of header & footer styles, demos, page templates, and much more. Composer comes with an attractive styling option for the header. Going beyond the usual pre-defined layouts, Composer brings 11 hover styles for your header. This will make the area much more engaging, and you can show it to the world in a wide, boxed or framed layout! Composer has a neat mega menu built-in, that gives you the opportunity to add a background image, icons, and tags to better address the navigation desires of your visitors.
The Innwit author took some time to test the usability of the theme. It combined the design with the everyday hassle of posting, maintaining and optimizing to give a pretty intuitive theme. You can create pages and posts with media files and extras since the template comes with individual settings per page or post and global options for the entire website. Each page is ready to load custom blocks or templates using the drag and drop Visual Composer plugin.
You can change the typography globally for all the website or just for the desired components: titles, menus, content and so on. In addition, Composer comes with advanced typography options that show you the exact fonts for specific titles in blogs and pages, links, logos or main menu. You can combine Google Fonts and see them in a live preview box, in Theme Options panel.
One more thing before going to Functionality: the Composer theme comes with pre-made templates as the Home Pages, Inner Pages, Blocks and Header Styles, which you can use to create a new page. As these elements are designed specifically for Composer, you might need to take some time and experiment with the pre-built templates and layouts. All of them come with a different design and behavior, and you can customize or combine them as you like.
Functionality
Composer comes with a well-structured Theme Options panel that brings together settings related to header & footer, portfolio, styling, typography, blog, shop, archive and other. A helpful tool is the search button, which eases the process of finding a particular setting. As I previously mentioned in Design, Composer comes with pre-built demos with pages and posts to ease your work. But to import a demo, you’ll have to install WordPress Importer v2 plugin and setup your homepage to be static.
Furthermore, a well-known drag and drop page builder, Visual Composer plugin powers the theme. This means that you’ll be able to build your website just using the mouse and without touching the code behind it. Besides, with over 25 custom elements and many more templates like blocks or portfolios, this theme can give you a pleasant experience in the backend & frontend editing. Additionally, Composer comes with a drag and drop Header Builder placed in Theme Options panel. This tool is dedicated to helping you create and customize a special header area with a menu, search icon, WooCommerce cart, widgets or social icons.
The theme comes bundled with some premium tools you most likely need to create a beautiful site such as Visual Composer, Ultimate Visual Composer Add-on, and Revolution Slider plugins. It also comes with a required Composer Core plugin. The custom plugin brings the needed functionality for extra page & posts options.
Moreover, if you want to build a multilanguage website, you’ll be glad Composer is compatible with WPML and RTL ready.
| GENERAL | |
|---|---|
| Item name | Composer |
| Category | Multi-purpose |
| Type | Premium |
| Author | Innwithemes |
| Envato elite author | - |
| Tested version | 2.0 |
| COMPATIBILITY | |
| Content width | Full width |
| Browser compatibility | IE9+ / Chrome / FF / Opera / Opera Mini / Safari / Edge |
| WooCommerce | Yes |
| bbPress | - |
| BuddyPress | - |
| WPML | Yes |
| FONTS AND TRANSLATION | |
| Integrated translation | - |
| Google fonts | Yes |
| Custom fonts | - |
| Typekit fonts | - |
| RTL support | Yes |
| POST FEATURES | |
| Video posts | Yes |
| Audio posts | Yes |
| Post templates | 1 |
| Post view counter | - |
| Smart lists | - |
| Social share | Yes |
| Custom image lightbox | Yes |
| Custom image galery | Yes |
| Link post | Yes |
| PAGE FEATURES | |
| Page templates | 66 |
| Blocks | 149 |
| Widgets | 1 |
| Header styles | 12 |
| Footer styles | 22 |
| Masonry layout | Yes |
| Mega menus | Yes |
| Sticky menu | Yes |
| Social networks | Yes |
| Social counter | - |
| Video playlists | Yes |
| Instagram widget | - |
| Custom Page Builder | Visual Composer |
| Portfolio styles | 6 |
| Responsive layout | Breakpoints |
| Blog layouts | 3 |
| Menu styles | 10 |
| Dual Sidebars | - |
| Shortcodes | - |
| Video slider | - |
| OTHER FEATURES | |
| Demos included | 70 |
| SEO optimized | Yes |
| Custom Theme Updater | - |
| ADS | |
| Ad system | - |
| Adsense support | - |
| Custom ads | - |
| PERFORMANCE | |
| CSS file size | 724 kb |
| Overall speed | Very high |
| Performance documentation | - |
| USER EXPERIENCE | |
| Total ratings | 31 |
| User rating | |
| Learnability | Easy |
| DESIGN | |
| Responsive design | Yes |
| Retina ready | Yes |
| DOCUMENTATION | |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Explanations | Less Detailed |
| Explicit screen shots | Yes |
| Video tutorials | Yes |
| Search option | - |
| Extra documentation | - |
| PREMIUM PLUGINS | |
| Plugins | Composer Core, Visual Composer, Ultimate Visual Composer Add-on, Revolution Slider |
| VALUE | |
| Price | $59 |
| Value for the money | Good |
Performance
We have tested Composer’s default demo on different page speed tests, and the content loads at a medium speed.
Downsides
The theme’s documentation is not as detailed as expected. There is only basic information and it is not updated to the last version. Even though, you can find some useful screenshots and also video tutorials on YouTube.
Composer comes with pre-made templates like Home Pages, Inner Pages, Blocks and Header Styles. You might need to take some time and test the pre-built templates since there’s no clear information.
The Composer template doesn’t give you the possibility to show two sidebars at the same time.
You can only update the template using the Envato Toolkit. There is no automatic system created to ease this process.
