Look
When you land on a home page designed with the Open Air theme, from Woo Themes you immediately get the feeling that you are on a well made website. It has a clean, stylish layout, that does not say cheesy blog design at all.
The site title is presented in a sleek lowercase font. And there is plenty of space in the layout for your content to be organized and uncluttered, while leaving room for advertising and navigational elements. Categories and archives are presented in multiple locations without making the page feel redundant.
You have room for a feature photo and introductory text on the front page, above the fold. Below the fold there is planned space for advertising that will enhance, rather than overwhelm your content.
The pages are organized in a neat grid format which makes the grouping of your photos and text clear to the reader.
Feel
When setting up the theme, you are able to choose between a more personal style, or magazine layout depending upon your needs. You also have access to multiple page styles within the theme, including archives, sitemap, image gallery and video player.
Function
There is an easy to use video player embedded in the theme that will allow you to layout your videos in a neat, accessible page.
You will not need to download and install a bunch of third party widgets to get a great, functional sidebar. The sidebar included in the theme is fully widgetized.
Your rss feed is offered to your visitors at both the top and bottom of the main page, making publication a breeze. The feed is located at the top of all other pages.
Ease of setup
Right out of the box Open Air has a fresh blue and white color scheme. Or if you prefer, you can alter the colors and layout to reflect your companies vision from within the theme without doing a lot of coding.
Images can be resized within the theme, without having to use a third party photo editor. Your thumbnails and featured photos will always look good on the page.
Gravatars are supported. So your authors and visitors will look and feel like the integral part of your site that they are without you having to do a lot of setup to make it happen.
Each category gets its own page, with corresponding subcategories in a drop down menu format making navigation very user friendly. A search box is also available at the top.
The options page
Open Air has a theme options page that makes most of the code involved with customization invisible to the person setting up the site. It’s perfect for a small business owner who wants to focus the majority of their time on other aspects of the business.
Why would I want to use this theme?
If your readers love photos and videos this is a great theme. You can give them what they want without hassle.
People who have a lot of content to share, especially in the form of multimedia, that do not want it to be cluttered will appreciate the simple layout of this theme.
Someone who wants to spend their time developing content, rather than creating the code to present it will enjoy the simplicity and ease of setup of this theme.
Is there anything you don’t like about this theme?
This theme would probably be unsuitable for a site focused on text based content, that is not supported by multimedia.
Open Air is a very modern theme. Someone who prefers a more ornate design with fancy text will not appreciate its simplicity.














August 4th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
I actually quite like this design. I typically don’t like blue for blogs, but I think that the different shades work together to make it a really attractive style, and its not difficult to read. I also like that the sidebar is fully widgetized :D