Gazette is a theme that balances rich functionality with a pleasant, non-obtrusive look. Depending on your site's needs, you can tweak it to look as stark and clean, or as warm and vibrant as you wish.
Business owners, visual artists, and bloggers of all stripes can find something (or many things) to love about Gazette. The theme is particularly suited for those with image-heavy content: with striking Featured Images, several custom Post Formats, and an optional featured content area on the homepage, it displays your posts with extra visual oomph.
Not sure if it's the theme for you? Here are four strikingly different sites that make the most of Gazette's features.
Covering the geekier side of film and pop culture, simple tricks & nonsense harnesses Gazette's featured content area to highlight some of its greatest hits from the archives. The result is a colorful, engaging homepage that draws the reader in (the custom font in the headings adds a nice touch, too).
Scroll below the fold, and the site's latest posts are there, each with its own featured image:
The colorful grid makes for a pleasing, smooth reading experience, where the reader's eye is always engaged, but never distracted or disoriented by too much visual stimuli.
On the more minimalist end of the spectrum we find depression comix, a weekly web comic depicting the daily struggles of people dealing with mental health issues.
The site's design complements its topic perfectly: using only a Site Logo in the header area, visitors are immediately plunged into a neat grid of posts that mimics the format of the comic itself. Here, Gazette recedes into the background, letting artist Clay's work do the talking.
Calluna Studios
A professional photographer's website, Calluna Studios highlights the work of Heather, the woman behind the camera, with a warm, clean look.
The site's primary navigation menu in the header is stripped to the bare essentials: links to the homepage and the contact page. Our eye immediately wanders to the lovely header image, featuring the silhouette of a family enjoying a beautiful summer sunset outdoors.
Heather makes great use of the different Post Formats available in Gazette to highlight her projects in different ways and to avoid an overly monotonous homepage. The row of posts above, for example, features (from left to right) a standard post, an image post, and a gallery post.
If you'd like to see the theme's Featured Images in action in single-post view, make sure to check out one of these three posts. (Hint: they look gorgeous!)
Back to Spain, a food and lifestyle site by Caitlin, a blogger passionate about cooking and travel, nails a perfect balance between minimalism and vibrancy.
Caitlin's homepage and her individual posts come alive with beautiful photography, and she uses Gazette's full-width Featured Images to great effect throughout her site, like in this post for a patatas arrugadas recipe:
The rest of Caitlin's site is just as smartly designed, with a well-organized main menu in the header and discreet social links in the footer's widget area (one of two optional widget areas in Gazette).
Are you using Gazette for your site? Which of the theme's features is your favorite? Let us know in the comments!
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