We have often been engrossed in discussing about the beauty of themes, be it wordpress or blogger. That is why Taragana has featured articles like, Top 100 free WordPress themes, Top 20 Premium WordPress Themes, Top 10 Websites to Choose the Best Free Blogger Template for Your Blog. So after much of a thought about all of them, we decided to take one at a time and scrutinize them to bring in the review. Our first one is a really bright free wordpress theme called Red Light. Its a 3-column theme with two sidebars which are positioned on the left and the right side.

First Look

The first look inside our team sums it up pretty well, our developers jumped up and said, its too bright and flowery (effectively saying that it sucks), our designers were quite impressed. The bottom line - You need to have a bit of an artistic sense to really understand and value the theme as it is. Let’s analyze its design

Design

Header Image

The header image is absolutely amazing. I am really impressed with the way bright red with black and white and yellow brush strokes intermingle. A wonderfully crafted piece with Photoshop Illustrator.

The basic frame

We need to understand the concept of abstractness in the blog as three border lines have a definite frame to follow but no straight line is there but some cleverly articulated mushy brush strokes.

Left SideBar

The left side bar by default has

• Pages (the ones you will like to have in the navigation bar)
• Categories
• Archives
• Calendar

The combination of red and black with a outline of white at the right side has given it a perfect contrast. Again, there is no definite shape and size. Every thing is under a definite space but not with a conventional straight lined or square shaped form.

Right Sidebar

The Right side bar by default has

• Recent posts
• Tag Cloud
• Blogroll
• Meta links

Here unlike the whole theme, there is a definite square shaped pattern and box-ed look. Which is conscious but I kindda didn’t like the art associated with it. While the orange and red combination looks well, still in that whole theme, the straight lines are a turn off and more importantly, the bullets could have been given a different color than the dark brown shade.

Other Places

Icons

At the top right, the RSS feed icon looks absolutely wonderful. I appreciate the designer for choosing such a tasteful icon and also, the search area with a bent search box supports the theme well. The white splash round that area looks cool too. It makes us realize that the designer has worked a lot to conceptualize the design.

Date

The thought bubble or the talk- bubble as we call it, associated with the date looks innovative and nice. You can question its relevance in a date format. I guess he wanted to use it as in like “the blogger said this on that date” type of concept. I liked it.

On a second thought, I would have loved to see the icon a tad small. For a very short article, the date takes away the major attention and enough screen space which is not intended. Right?

Single Post

If you look at a single post, the combination of font, with red header, light brown link color, black border at the end — all of it makes another contrasting image which is appreciable.

SEO

1. I looked into the header.php to find out if it is SEO-ed and while doing some little research, I found out this to be a non optimized theme which is understandable because the target audience is not exactly the professional bloggers. Let me give you one e.g. in support of my claim.
   
   My findings about the title tag was the default format that wordpress uses i.e Post name << Blog name. You can also see the code snippet and google search result to confirm what I am talking about.
   

   Code snippet from the header.php of the theme. The title tag is not SEO-ed

2. What I liked is, the codes in this theme are properly indented. I really liked this as most of the themes aren’t. Helps developers to in many ways.

Target Audience

Certainly for someone who loves colors. Red brings in passion and confidence and lot of energy. Good for artists, writers, and esp. women.

Conclusion

The purpose of this theme is to be artistic. We shouldn’t be over critical of the non-SEO parameters because the very intention of this blog is to look good and reach the personal blog writers. If you are looking for a wordpress theme which is free and for your personal use, you can use it. Without any major discrepancy, this blog stands out tall with its illustrative design.