Ronneby Theme Review

Ronneby is a premium creative WordPress Theme released in June 2015 by DFDevelopment, an Envato Elite author. This beautiful corporate template was built to satisfy the desires of developers and agencies. Merging bold designs with extreme functionality, Ronneby brings stunning visual aesthetics while providing decent page loading performance for any website you plan to develop.

Design

Ronneby comes with a modern and elegant design inviting users to discover many tools available and expresses their creativity. This template is built to allow you to be an artist and deliver a high aesthetic website to your beholders. With Ronneby, your site is all about challenging design to show off content. And to make sure that your visitors can see the results just as you planned, with Ronneby you can set up the screen size for each device in particular, or just let the responsive nature of the theme do its work.

The template comes with over 40 pre-built designs ready to be uploaded on your website to give you a fast start. The Traditional, Minimalist, Fitness Gym, Medicine, and other 41 demos will transform your website in a specialized corporate portal, creative site, eShop or blog. You can use the Installer Panel plugin or WordPress Importer to upload these designs. There’s one thing you should know, though: when switching between demos, installing the new pre-built layout will overwrite the all the existing settings.

In full-width or not, you don’t have to build your pages from scratch. The Ronneby theme comes with over 80 pre-built page templates. Each template and pre-made block can be customized to fit your needs. You can also enable page scroll animation globally on your website.

The most visible part of a website and the main navigation tool is the header. It’s essential to use a well-designed header in your quest for a seamless user experience and to emphasize your website’s visual identity. To support the branding efforts, Ronneby brings you 14 header styles, each with its character and feeling. You can style them individually, adding animations, buttons, social links, search icon, a background color and more. An interesting element of flexibility is that you can customize the header even when you build a page.

If you like animations, for the Above the Fold area you can add a module called Scrolling Effect Module which will scale down the image while you scroll.

After so much effort invested in headers, you can add a final touch to your pages with a nice footer. Ronneby brings you three footer types to choose from Compact, Standard with Widgets, Standard with Visual Composer modules. You can, also, add a background color or image and a copyright notice.

For content, Ronneby is merging design with functionality to give you aesthetics. You can build your content as clean text with pictures, gallery, video, quote or audio and customize all the posts styles. The theme allows you to add self-hosted videos or mp3 audio files in the content area. On each post or page, you have additional settings for header, preloader, excerpts, author, menu position or background that provide better control over the content. And if you select the parallax effect, the theme will change the way it displays the footer sections. Ronneby comes with various pre-built templates dedicated for blogs and eShops ready to be added to your website with a click.

The typography is also essential when you are struggling to create a unique touch and feel for your site. With Ronneby, you add custom typography to the website and download the font-face.zip archive to generate fonts with a Webfont Generator. This theme also comes with galleries for Icon Fonts Manager and Google Fonts Manager with an option to upload new ones. Colors, button shapes, opacity, hover colors and borders are some of the options you can apply to the website’s typography.

Ronneby is a social-friendly theme built to let the visitors share your content with their friends. The template brings you a neatly crafted function that allows you to display the latest tweets on the website. It works with a consumer key, access token and the number of the most recent tweets to show.

Functionality

Ronneby comes with a Theme Options panel structured in over 20 sections and many other sub-sections. The significant number of features and elements could become overwhelming at first, but these settings give you control to manage everything.

An interesting function located in Theme Options panel is the System check which allows you to access information related to the server options, file systems, PHP extensions or active plugins.

Ronneby is powered by a drag and drop page builder – Visual Composer plugin providing various block elements. For more flexibility, the author added both backend and frontend functionality that allows you to edit pages and post structure. With the drag and drop page builder, you can showcase your images in beautiful ‘Portfolios’ and quickly integrate them into pages. The theme also provides masonry grid styles and attractive animation effects to customize the portfolios and galleries. If you are passionate about design, you can create unique pages using the ‘Side by Side Slider’ module that brings a beautiful sliding effect to the left and right parts of the page.

With Ronneby, you can use dual sidebars on the website and easily customize them with over 20 widgets. Adding video, audio content or the WooCommerce bestsellers on a sidebar is quite fast.

This theme comes with the Advanced Custom Fields, Installer, Slider Revolution, Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer and the SML Sidebar Generator plugins. The Ronneby template is WooCommerce compatible and offers options that almost make it viable as an eCommerce theme, with many products, categories, and shop pages tools.

Ronneby is also compatible with BuddyPress, bbPress and WPML plugins. This theme has RTL support.

If you are passionate about coding, you can make changes to the Ronneby files using the child theme available in the installation package.

Performance

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

Downsides

The Ronneby backend seems to need optimizations as it works a little too slow and sometimes it gets stuck as are too many options that slow down the loading speed.

The theme panel is well structured in categories and subcategories, but it could be difficult to determine which one has a sub-category unless you access the section itself and a drop-down appears.

The learning curve can be pretty steep and quite time-consuming until you learn your way around Ronneby. Even more, the documentation is not provided with a search button, and you need to open each menu and submenu to find something.

This theme can be a tough user experience, especially if you are a WordPress beginner.