This week Kori takes time to showcase a new WordPress theme from TemplateMonster.com called Monstroid. Don’t let it seem like option overload. Kori will give her opinion of the theme and her insight on using it for your WordPress website.
Hey y’all welcome to another WordPress Wednesday.
My name is Kori Ashton and today we’re going to be looking at a brand new theme that was sent to me actually by Template Monster. Most of you know that I spend time over on Themeforest and very, very rarely go looking for themes WordPress themes outside of Themeforest.net However, Template Monster saw our YouTube Channel and said “Hey Kori, would you be interested in possibly reviewing one of our themes that we just released?”
So this was released a little while back. I’m going to slide off the screen so you can take a look at things here. This is a theme called Monstroid. It is over on Template Monster. (If you want to get 20% off Monstroid, use this promo-code in shopping cart : webtegrity. It work till the end of September, so hurry up! And if you want to get 30% off for all templates, register here http://goo.gl/sup97e )
So you’ll want to check that out or look in the description box below. I’ll put the link down there for you. It’s a pretty slick-looking theme. Misspelled WordPress but that’s okay. They’ll get it right, I’m sure, elsewhere. And I say “misspelled” because the P is supposed to be capped, right? We all know that.
But scrolling down through here. I’m checking it out for the first time today. I’ve already installed it in a demo site, and I’m going to walk you through my expectations and experience seeing this theme.
It is a little bit pricier. The cost here is $79 and normally over on Themeforest you’re looking to stay around the $45 – $60 range. Typically I’ve not seen one go above that. So this one being on Template Monster being at $79 is a little pricier, but I’m going to show you why I think it might even be worth that money. Alright?
So, here we go. I’m going to slide off screen again so you can just pay attention to what I’m doing here. I’m going to go into our dashboard. This is TemplateMonster.com This is the company that’s produced this awesome template. And I went ahead and had probably one of the smoothest installs I have ever done for a theme. I was extremely impressed with how simple it was. You do get an activation key code that you have to drop in and once you’ve got that in place it literally brings up a screen (snap), and I’m sorry I did this prior to recording so that I could review the theme first. But it brings up a screen very quickly that you click through. You click through and it says – “Are you ready to install?” Click install. It installs it. Then the next thing you know – it pops up another screen and it says – “Would you like the sample data included?” Click install. (snap)
It does it instantly and installs it for you. Before you know it, you’re actually running your website that looks exactly – exactly like the demo. Incredibly cool to see this happen. They spelled it right here. So kudos to those guys. So just scrolling down through here – It literally is going to look identical to the demo. It’s very, very exciting. Of course the theme is fully responsive. So it’s going to look great on your cell phone as it shrinks down on any size device. It shrinks down here and looks beautiful with the menu now going into this beautiful hamburger icon here opening up and allowing you to scroll through your different page options.
So really beautiful layout. Nicely done. However, for some of you who have seen my YouTube Channel before in the past, you know that I have a phrase called “Option Overload.” This theme gives you that. This really could be the only theme you would ever, ever, ever need to buy. You could literally make this theme look so different on every website you ever created that nobody would know that you were even using the exact same theme. And you would become so proficient at this one theme that you could build them out very, very quickly. It has everything you could imagine inside of it. It has an area for Portfolio. It has your Services listed. It has your Team area, so if you want a really great about us section, you can add in different team members dynamically. A Testimonials area. A couple of different options for your slide shows. A Client’s area. Who knows – Dream big on how you would use these spaces. It does have WooCommerce, and I’ll come back to MotoPress here. It does have WooCommerce inside of it. So that you can even have all sorts of products. If you want to be selling things from the website. You also have this ability which is cool. It’s called White Label. Slide off screen again here so you can just check this out. If you’ve ever wanted to have instead of logging in and seeing the WordPress logo here in the middle of the screen maybe you wanted to have a welcome logo maybe your client’s logo or your own logo there. You’re able to change all of those things very, very quickly right here in this space. You can change the login area here the footer area here. A Welcome Panel there. The Admin bar even – you can hide certain things. Really incredible that the author would go above and beyond giving you access at this level. Typically that requires doing some sort of a child theme when making those types of customization changes. You see here on the left side that you’ve got your dashboard area to go in here. Cherry Framework is actually the framework that is used to make all of the customization to the colors and the layout structure and all of that fun stuff. So you get to see this space here for setting up your navigation, your header your pages, your typography, and all of your color options, and everything like that inside of here.
So, I’m going to take you to the one spot though, honestly, that has completely wowed me with this theme. It’s mind-blowing. It might even be revolutionary to how you will ever again build a WordPress website, or maintain it for that matter.
Check this out.
As most of you know I have students, because we teach classes here at WebTegrity – in person classes for WordPress. You get to come in and sit down with us and nerd out with us and I’ve had a student in the past say to me, “Kori, if we see it on the front side of the website like this. If we see this and it says – ‘Our Expert Team Support.’ Why can’t we just click right there and change it? You know? If is says this, ‘Never Before Seen Access’ why can’t we just click on that area right here and just change it right here instead of having to go log in to the page and try to figure out where that spot is in some sort of page builder. I don’t understand why we can’t just get there and do that.”
To which I said – “Man – that would be incredible if you could build that. I know I would buy that plugin or that theme.”
Well, here it is, you guys. It’s been built. The student didn’t do this. Template Monster included inside of it’s something called MotoPress, and I’m share a little bit more of that here in a minute, but I’m going to click on that and activate it, and slide off screen again so you can check this out. You might think – Wow, that’s a little time consuming It doesn’t matter. It’s actually building out the page for you right here, right now. It’s building out the page for you to literally be able to click. This is better than any page builder I have ever seen. Typically the page builders require you to click on the little tiny icon and then open up the space and then try to figure out how it was coded, or use different boxes.
Never Before Seen Access. If I wanted to change this wording – there ya go. This is how it would change. I could of course change all sorts of stuff here just like you normally would inside of your WYSIWYG environment in WordPress. I could change it there. Click update up here at the top. It’s going to update and literally – just like that. I have not had to log into any sort of cumbersome page builder. I’ve literally been able – I’m going to come here to the front side and click refresh. I’ve literally been able to make that change right there on the spot. This is how it would change. How amazing is that, you guys? And it’s that simple all the way down the page.
If I wanted to change any of this – the slider, I can just double click and go in there and change that. These three columns here. Just double-click inside and that activates the editor mode and you’re able to go in and change anything you want to change. Of course, all of this is responsive layout too.
So “Like what we offer” change that text. Change it to anything you want. Click update. That’s what it’s going to change to.
And again sliding down – if we wanted to change this button or anything else as you hover over them – you see these little three dots that means that you’re about to select that particular space. So let me show you a space down here for instance. Let’s go up here to this parallax. This really cool image behind the scenes here with a thousand coffee cups and 74 projects done and 99 customers – you can see the little outline box, hover over it. But what if I want to change this picture back here? Come to this left side – there’s the little three dots. Double click that and it gives me access to go back and change the parallax image. All it is – is dropping in the URL of where that image lives on your server. Isn’t that mind-blowing, you guys?
I’m actually going to go ahead and do a complete tutorial next week on MotoPress so that you’re able to see what all of its capabilities are. If you’d like to learn more about it today, check out the description box below. I’m going to put a link there. Click on that. Take off and go over there and check it out.
The pricing on it is pretty fantastic honestly. You can purchase it for one single website for $29 bucks or if you’re a developer doing it on a lot of websites jump over to the $139. Of course that’s going to need – you’re probably going to have to renew that annually, but I just stumbled upon this because of Template Monster sending this my way. It’s revolutionizing the way we’re going to do things from now on, you guys.
So be sure to check it out. If you’d like to know more about the Monstroid theme, which I think is pretty spectacular – USE COUPON CODE webtegrity to get 20% off your purchase.
If there’s one down side I’d say is that it does run a lot of plugins. That’s the only downside. If you go here to the installed plugins I think there’s something like 30 active plugins. But it’s because okay so there are 33. It’s just because there’s literally a ton of options in here. Of course some of that is going to be WooCommerce. Some of that is going to be our MotoPress. Some of it’s going to be the Cherry Framework that this particular theme was built on. So I love it though. I think it was a great opportunity to review a really great theme with some fantastic features and shortcodes inside of it.
So you guys, check it out. I’ll put the link to this theme in the description box below. Let me know your thoughts too. Put them in the comment box below and let me know what your experience was with this theme.
I’ll see you next WordPress Wednesday. Bye – Bye, Y’all
