Kallyas Theme Review

Last updated on August 31, 2017

Kallyas is a multi-purpose theme launched in February 2013 by Hogash, an Envato power elite author. This theme has a strong, visual design powered by a flexible front-end page builder. Thanks to the multiple options and features provided, Kallyas will help you build a remarkable website.

Design

Inspired by the ancient Greek word ‘kallias’ which means ‘beauty,’ this theme brings you a fine balance between ancient inspired design and modern lines. Kallyas comes with 53 easy to install demos. As the authors named two of them ‘Ares,’ as the Greek God of War, and ‘Kyma’ which means ‘waves,’ this theme is built to give you access to the visual power that will impress your audience.

Tightly connected to the business branding efforts, the developers designed the ‘Header’ section for flexibility. Hogash team has dedicated a lot of time to create plenty of header options and settings. The template comes with unlimited custom sub-headings combination designed to highlight the content displayed “above the fold.” Besides this, Kallyas has integrated a plugin that delivers extra customization options. The Side Header Addon will replace the theme’s default header with a side block containing elements like logo image, main navigation, search form, and others.

The theme developers came up with 14 static content elements, called the ‘Hero Scenes.’ These templates will help you create an impressive appearance for your pages. You can style the sub-header area using a video or an image with animation effects as background or add functionality with a weather or booking panel, an event countdown box, a product presentation, or other useful elements. This theme also comes with a dark or light skin for your website, which can be further customized by changing the color schemes according to your preferences.

Kallyas provides 15 pre-built homepage styles to choose from, but you also can create your own template. If you like to play with pictures and animations, the theme has 22 slider elements integrated, such as 3D Cute, Fancy, Laptop, Nivo, but it also comes with image boxes, galleries, portfolios and more additional visual enhancement options. With Kallyas, portfolios can be styled in three ways, with a carousel layout, ‘sortable’ or ‘category,’ in 1 to 4 columns. You can help the visitors focus on your content setting up the videos or images to be shown in a modal window.

In the footer section, you can add widgets on two rows. Also, you can select an image or a color as footer background. At the bottom of this field, you can insert some additional elements, a logo, social icons and copyright text.

Kallyas theme will create a beautiful experience for your visitors on any kind of devices since this template is responsive and retina ready.

Functionality

This template has an elaborated options panel located in the WordPress admin area, called ‘Kallyas Theme.’ Structured in many subsections, this theme’s control area gives you easy access to all the customization settings. At the bottom of each section, you’ll find links to the Kallyas documentation, this way you won’t get lost through the options.

From the General Options area you can adjust the header, logo, sub-headers, navigations, and the footer sections. An interesting option, available in this area, allows you to change the animation effect and color of the page preloader. Use a pulsating circle, a spinner or any of the six animation effects and add more style to your website. The Kallyas Theme panel has dedicated tabs for the blog, fonts, smart areas, colors, sidebars and so on. The developers also included a useful tool called Live text editor. You can edit the content inside a text box, on the front end, without any hassle.

The theme’s strongest point is the custom front-end, drag and drop ‘Visual Builder,’ which comes with 136 helpful elements. This builder allows you to create & save layouts and use them later on other sections of your website. Adding elements to a page is easy. The Visual Builder provides a search bar to help you find what are you looking. Once you have found it, just drag and drop it to the page.

Some of your website’s sections can be replaced with the ‘Page Builder Smart Areas,’ which are predefined templates created on the front-end with block elements. These Smart Areas can be customized to always appear on sub-header and footer sections for wanted pages.

Each creative template you have built can be saved for a quick edit and access in four dedicated sections in the WordPress admin area: Portfolio Items, Documentation Items, Page Layouts and the Page Builder Smart Areas.

Kallyas theme comes with the premium ‘Revolution Slider’ and other free plugins like ‘Cute Slider,’ ‘Calendar Event,’ or ‘WP Hotel Booking.’ Hogash developed ‘Post Love,’ a custom plugin that adds a ‘Like’ option on each post. Represented by a red heart as an icon and a counter, its function is to highlight the most liked posts by your visitors.

If you want to set up an eShop, the integrated WooCommerce plugin will be a benefit. It comes packed with lots of options and features. Your visitors can see your products in a nice slider gallery, and zoom on their favorite product.

Kallyas theme is compatible with the premium WPML multi language plugin and also supports RTL. This template is responsive and retina ready. The Kallyas template comes with child theme files included in the package, useful if an advanced user wants to make modifications in code, without altering the main files.

Performance

We have tested Kallyas default demo on different page speed tests, and it loads the content with a rather slow page speed. It shows 65/100 on Google PageSpeed on the desktop.

Downsides

The theme’s builder is not as intuitive as expected, it’s time-consuming, and you need to watch many video tutorials to learn your way around it. Without a visual ‘guidance border,’ it’s a bit confusing to set the page’s containers. To split a row into 2 or more columns, you have to add the element below the section and choose its width from 12 available possibilities.

A WordPress beginner may find this theme overwhelming. Once you learn you way around it, this template is pretty straightforward to use.

Kallyas theme doesn’t provide an ad system or AdSense support. To monetize your website, you’ll have to use an external plugin.