We have decided to be brutally honest with you in this post. We struggled to produce an extraordinary WordPress theme, and to some extent, we did it. Thousands of users downloaded Rife theme. We are proud of it, but the biggest challenge for us isn’t the number of active installs—that’s just a vanity metric. Satisfying the users’ needs and preferences is all that matters!
Some users want more features, while others appreciate simplicity. We need to find the sweet point between complexity and simplicity, and that’s not simple to do. As a result, we’ve started working in two directions. First, our development team works hard to bring more useful features to Rife theme. Simultaneously, we show how many cool things you can achieve with our theme on our blog.
Disclaimer: This article strictly focuses on Rife Free Theme. Rife Pro and its features are the subject of a future post.
What You Can Do with Rife Free Theme
Our intention with Rife is to serve as many people as possible. However, adding too many features and options may end up in a big fiasco, so we crafted Rife with a limited number of purposes in mind.
Portfolios
Rife works perfectly for any kind of portfolio. Whether you are a designer, developer, photograph, or artist, Rife has all the ingredients needed for a perfect portfolio.
Check out the Cropps and Frame demos to get an idea of how to build a portfolio using Rife theme. It comes with many features suitable for creating an outstanding portfolio.
- Modern Design
An outdated portfolio design destroys the owner’s reputation. Rife may be the foundation of truly astonishing portfolios. Use it if you want to create a minimalist or black-and-white design. Consider adding full-screen images or videos to impress site visitors immediately. Go to the admin dashboard and then go to Appearance > Customize > Album Settings to bring that sparkle of dynamism needed to impress viewers.
Clearly, Rife has enough features to empower you to create a modern website.
- Customization Options
In the previous article, we mentioned how important customization options are for a portfolio. Rife packages a plethora of customization options to create original designs.
- Unique Galleries
While you shouldn’t ignore the homepage, you do need to focus on the galleries. Here people will judge your work and evaluate your skills. You will get hired if the work satisfies them. Luckily, Rife provides tons of solutions to exhibit work.
Photography Sites
Exhibiting images is another one of Rife’s purposes. Many portfolio-specific features overlap with photography site features. Frame and Star are two demos revealing how to use Rife for a photography site.
Why should you use Rife for such a project? Well, in addition to the endless features and modern design, there are two particularly useful traits.
- Optimized for Speed
You don’t have any choice but to upload high-quality images on your site. Uploading them is simple, but the real problem is that they hog the site’s resources and slow down the loading speed. Fortunately, we thought about that in advance and did our best to create a lightweight theme that loads quickly.
- Attractive Page Pre-Loaders
It’s not a disaster if your site’s images don’t load instantly because Rife includes a handy feature. Many themes come with cool page pre-loaders, but Rife takes it to the next level. Go to the admin dashboard and visit Appearance > Customize > General Settings > Page Preloader. Here you can set up the page pre-loader, and you have a lot of options to choose from.
Business Sites
Rife Pro is more suited to business sites than Rife Free theme, but you can still create a business site with Rife Free. If you are reluctant, check out the Lander demo.
There are a couple of reasons to use Rife for a business site. I have already mentioned the many styling options, modern design, and the fast loading speed. In addition to these, it’s worth mentioning the following traits.
- Optimized for Search Engines
Don’t expect to get the first position in the search results just because you installed Rife. SEO is a complicated matter, and Google takes into account more than 200 factors when ranking sites. However, we used the latest technologies to develop Rife, and its code is clean and crawlable by search engines. In plain English, we did our part, but you have to do the leg work to get top-ranking positions.
- One-Page Format
Having a single web page for your site is a feature you can live without, but it’s common among business websites. Check out Lander again to see how it works.
Online Stores
Rife is suitable for online stores, and it’s compatible with the WooCommerce plugin. WooR is a good-looking online store template available for importing on your site.
You can also find our Rife Free Theme in this useful article: 7 Best WordPress Themes for your WooCommerce
Features
Now you have a complete idea about what you can achieve with Rife. However, there are a few other features that fully deserves your attention.
- Writing Effect
The little details make a big difference, and Writing Effect is a good example in this regard. Use this effect on the homepage or if you have a long slogan. Head to Appearance > Customize > Miscellaneous > Writing Effect to enable it and set up the speed.
- Design Importer
All WordPress themes come with pre-built demos aimed at helping people see how these themes work for various kinds of projects. Rife is no an exception, but it goes the extra mile by streamlining the demo import. Go to your admin dashboard and click on Appearance > Rife Free Import and select Info > Demo Importer. Select the free template you want to import, configure it, and hit Start importing the design. It takes around a minute to import it, and then you can start working on it.
- Ultra Responsive
These days, developing a responsive site isn’t something to brag about because most themes, if not all, are responsive. Still, being responsive doesn’t mean that the theme looks great on mobile devices. Rife is not only responsive but also ensures the same excellent user experience on any kind of mobile device.
- Extensive Documentation
A support forum, extensive documentation, and video tutorials are the ways to get help when you are stuck with Rife. Unlike other free themes, these resources provide 360-degree support.
Visit the forum to see if other people have faced the same issue as you and create a thread if they haven’t.
The theme documentation is concise and action-oriented. Most explanations take the form of a checklist, and all you have to do is to follow the steps.
“How to Create a Filter in a gallery,” “How to Resize a Blog Post, and “What Is Photo Proofing” are just a few video tutorials worth watching.
Conclusions
We might be biased because we have put a lot of thought into crafting this theme. Therefore, you should check out Rife yourself. Download it, install it, and use it, and then let us know what you like and, more importantly, what you don’t like!
Hola, me ha encantado este tema. lo he activado para mi WebSite pero el único inconveniente que tengo es que no tengo claro el tamaño de la imagen de cabecera para poder subir la imagen correcta y no se pierda la calidad.
I just started using Rife Free Theme, Unicorn template for my nonprofit and I LOVE it! Having very little experience with creating a website prior to this, I was hesitant to move forward, but it has been very easy to use and it looks beautiful!
The only thing I’m struggling with is that a few of the header images I’ve replaced with a color block still show the original image on the mobile version of the site. I cannot for the life of me find where the original image may be to change it. Any thoughts or suggestions?