If you like designs that feature stunning, fullscreen background images, then Automattic’s latest free theme release is a prime candidate for your next blog redesign. Harmonic recently landed on WordPress.org and is rapidly closing in on 3,000 downloads.
This theme puts the spotlight on your images and content. Harmonic’s striking homepage is accompanied by a minimalist, one-column blog design and an optional portfolio page template.
Each section of the scrolling front page has options in the customizer that let you assign a unique display. The customizer allows you to easily set a background for the news, page, widgets, and portfolio sections. You can even include a background shade so that the title and tagline are more readable. The Visibility options allow you to hide any of the sections you’re not currently using.
Single posts and pages with a featured image will display in a fullscreen design similar to the homepage. The blog archive is available with your choice of a one or two-column layout.
With the addition of Jetpack, Harmonic also supports site logo upload and a portfolio. The customizer includes options for three different thumbnail aspect ratios, including: landscape (4:3), portrait (3:4), and square (1:1).
Harmonic includes a custom menu for social links and has support for 16 different social networks. Check out the live demo on WordPress.com to see the theme in action.
With the release of Harmonic for self-hosted sites, Automattic now has 60 free themes available in the directory. This theme caters to visual artists and bloggers who have large images to showcase in the background, portfolio, or gallery sections of the site.
Harmonic is unique in that it transforms featured images and titles into a splash page style intro to single posts. If you want to use images to make a strong impact on your reader, this theme fits the bill. It’s available on both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress sites via the admin themes browser.
The demo is non-functioning on an up to date Windows Phone. Sadly this is all too common. It’s not hard to support IE10 & 11, but too many developers and companies simply don’t bother even failing to account for the desktop edition.
Ignoring minority but still important browsers is like ignoring Macs ten years ago. I can understand why. If you’re working on a Mac testing in IE means firing up a virtual machine, and that’s a faff. It’s harder the other way though…PC users have no access to OSX at all. But we’re professionals, so let’s support all the things :-)