Review: The Hunter

October 17, 2007

I’ve been asked to review this WordPress theme named The Hunter, designed by Zinruss Studios. The theme is free and available for download. Zinruss Studios has created quite a few free WordPress themes, which you can find in a forum thread at TalkFreelance. Among them, The Glory Of Action is my favorite since it has the most innovative layout.

Features

Many bloggers want to put AdSense advertisements on their blog to earn a few dollars. It can, however, be hard for an inexperienced internet money maker to find the right ad placement. Not to mention the right color combination, which has a large impact on how many clicks you eventually get.

The Hunter is AdSense ready, which means you only need to paste your publisher ID and you’re ready to go. Placement and formatting has been done for you. The placement is non-intrusive and doesn’t compromise the content. As for color placement, the creator chose to go with the main color of the theme and seemingly transparent borders — both excellent choices.

Aside from a very subtle AdSense integration, the theme also has valid XHTML and CSS. This means that the design is less likely to differ between different web browsers. It’s compatible with most versions of WordPress above 2.2.

Design

Now let’s talk about the actual design of the theme. The main color of the theme, which is used on links and the frame, is a strong orange. The header, even though it has many details, is very subtly colored and fits well together with the rest of the theme. They did a good job with the details, as they’re pretty clean and don’t take the readers attention.

I also like how the diagonal stripes in the background prevents it from looking too plain. It’s nice too see that the very same stripes also appears slightly in the header. Another great detail about this theme is how only two edges of the main content window are rounded. It really enhances the sophistication.

Typography

It’s very hard to pass judgment on the typography of a WordPress theme since different niches and even individual blogs call for different text formatting. However, I can tell you that I like how they made the text a bit smaller than what we normally see. It gives the theme a sharper look that again enhances its sophistication. It fits well with the borders and lines that divide and structure the content.

The tagline has a nice placement and so does the title. But since I pay much attention to details, I’d like the title to be moved slightly to the right and a few pixels upward. That would really give them a harmonic placement.

Conclusion

I like this theme. I like the lines, borders and the contrast between subtle and strong colors. However, it looks like the header could be very hard to customize. I’d say that it could have been made somewhat further simplified and the layout is rather traditional but for being free, this is a very nice theme.

Rating: 3.5/5

Note: This is an extremely demanding site so don’t mistake the rating for being low.

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Category: Technology

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