Hueman Theme Review

They say “Hueman is the best rated theme ever for blogs and magazines on WordPress.org”. And it is in fact the best theme for blogging or any website that needs grid-based layouts. It’s 100% mobile friendly. The theme is so versatile that sometimes you might find yourself in a dilemma about which design to pick. With so many features and options, you surely are gonna love this review!

Note that, Hueman theme is only available in WordPress.org theme directory. You cannot use this theme on a WordPress.com website, not even in any paid plan. So if your website is hosted on WordPress.com, you probably should skip this theme.

Since there are a huge number of features in this theme, the review is also going to be a long one. For your convenience, I’ve provided here a table of contents. You can jump straight to any section or sub-section simply by clicking on the name of the sections from here:

Header Section:

Topbar:

At the very top of the website is the top menu area. I’m not sure if it belongs within the header section, but I thought I will include it here anyways.

The menu items are aligned to the left of the screen. At the right end of the topbar, there is an optional search icon which opens up a search field on click.

I personally like it when the top menu remains floating while I scroll down a page. In this way, I don’t have to scroll up all the way to reach the menu. Guess what, Hueman‘s topbar can be made floating just like this! Additionally, you can add a semi-transparent effect to the topbar, not to mention the option to change the background colour.

Another features of this bar is that, whatever be the screen size, it will always remain in a single row. So what if there are too many menu items? Well, in such case the last few items will replaced by a down arrow kind of symbol. They can be accessed only after clicking that arrow.

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Logo, Title & Tagline:

Like most other themes, Hueman allows you to add site logo, title, or a tagline in the header area. But here are few facts you should know:

• You can choose to show or hide the logo, site title and the tagline separately.
• Both the logo and the site title cannot be turned on at the same time. You either display the logo or you display the site title.
• The maximum height of the logo can be set manually.
• A separate logo can be set for mobile devices.

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Header widget area:

When no header image is set, you can add widgets in the header section. In a single column you can add as many widgets as you want, but also keep in mind that the more widgets you add here the more will be height of your header. This widget area is ideal for showing advertisement using a banner sized image.

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Header styles:

One of the specialities of this theme is the variety of header styles it provides. It offers a whooping SIX types of header designs!

1. Header with no image: The whole header area simply has a coloured background. The header background colour can obviously be changed.
2. Header with a simple banner image: Instead of a coloured background, the header has a background image. The tagline, blog title or the logo can either be displayed over the background image, or left out.
3. Post slider [Pro]: The header turns into a post slider. The post title and a Read more button is displayed in overlay on the featured image of respective posts. And of course you still can display the tagline and the logo (or title, whichever you’ve chosen) over the sliders.
4. Large header with dark skin [Pro]: The name says it all. It’s similar to the header with simple banner, only bigger in size. Although a dark skin is applied over the background image.
5. Large header with light skin [Pro]: Similar to the previous header type, only a light skin is applied instead of a dark skin. I like the light skin more than the dark one.
6. Free scroll slider [Pro]: This one is similar to the Post Slider style, except it does not link to any post. It’s more like an image carousel with a dark skin over it.

My choice is pretty simple. I am happy with the most simplest kind of header, a header with no image, no slider, just a plain one-colour background. But you might prefer images though. Here is how all the headers look like:

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A Second Menu Area:

There is a second menu area at the bottom of the header section. The position of this menu area suggests that it’s a housing for the main menu.

I would love it if this menu could be made floating. Because while scrolling, people want to have access to the main menu, not the secondary menu. But unfortunately it cannot be.

Remember that search icon on the topbar? You can move that icon to this menu area, which will be displayed at the left end, followed by the menu items.

For both the topbar menu and secondary menu, the sub-menu items open up on mouse hover with a nice slide-down animation. All the designs of the main menu (the background colour, semi-transparent effect etc.) are inherited to the sub-menus.

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Main Body:

Hueman outscores most other themes in this section, because It provides you with huge lot of options while choosing a design for your homepage or any other page. Let’s start with the sidebars.

Sidebars & Widgets:

It has two sidebars, named Follow and More. Of course you can change these names. But first let’s find out why they named them so and what they has to offer:

1. Follow Sidebar: This sidebar is always displayed on the left of the other sidebar. Your social media icons will be displayed just beside the title of this sidebar (optional). Now you know why this was named Follow. Other widgets can be added just like any other widget areas.
   It’s slightly wider between the two. So it can be considered as the primary sidebar.
2. More Sidebar: This one is always on the right side of the Follow sidebar. It’s slightly narrower, suitable for displaying widgets like Category, Tags, Archives etc.

Sidebar Layouts: By default, the two sidebars sandwich the main content column. Don’t like this design? No problem. You can go for:

• both sidebars on the right, content on the left
• or both sidebars on the left, content on the right
• or one sidebar on the left, the other one omitted
• or one sidebar on the right, the other one omitted
• or no sidebar at all!

What’s more interesting is that, you can select different layouts for your homepage, single posts, archive pages, search results page, even 404 page, independently from each other!

Other features of the sidebars: The sidebars has some other features, one of them is really my favourite. The sidebars can be made sticky. Which means no more white space on the sides! Even if the length of the sidebars is shorter than the main column, while scrolling they will stick on the sides until the main column ends.

Moreover, for single posts, you can choose to display the post navigation (Previous post, Next post) in either one of the sidebars. Although I think it’s better to put it below the post itself.

Unique Widgets: Hueman has a unique sidebar widget named Hueman Dynamic Tabs. This particular widget have 4 tabs, specially designed to show the recent posts, popular posts, recent comments and the tags.

Another special widget named Hueman Posts is a great way of showing latest or popular posts from different categories in the sidebars. Specially for a magazine type website, this widget is a gem.

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Page Templates:

Other than the default page template (whichever layout you’ve chosen as the default layout) there is one more special kind of page template that Hueman offers. It’s called Child Menu Template.

The layout of this template, as I’ve seen, is that only the primary sidebar will be there on the left, containing a menu. Other contents of the page will take rest of the screen.

Unfortunately I could not set up this template on my website. It was really confusing. And there is no documentation available on how to set up this type of page, not that I know of.

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Post Formats:

I didn’t even know there was a post format named Chat until I tried this theme. And I’ve tried almost 50 themes before! This theme never cease to amaze me.

Other than this format, it also supports 8 other post formats – Image, Gallery, Audio, Video, Aside, Status, Quote & Link. There is not much difference among them in the archive page, although there is an indication about the post format above the contents of the post itself.

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Grid types for archive pages:

When you can customize almost anything in this theme, why not the grid design too? Yes you can also customize the look of your archive pages. Here are the choices you get:

1. Two columns classical grid: The posts are displayed in a 2-columned grids, with featured images, post titles and excerpts being one below another. Each of the grids maintain a certain height, irrespective of the excerpt length.
   To maintain same height, sometimes a little space have to be kept blank between two posts. Too much gaps might make your website look empty. Beware of this.
2. Standard list: One single column list, with the featured images and the post title displayed side-by-side. The excerpt is displayed below the title.
3. Four columns masonry grid [Pro]: It’s just like the classical grid, except it has 4 columns, and the grids does not maintain any fixed height. And because of it’s masonry type layout, there will not be any blank spaces.
   Another cool feature of this layout is that, when infinity scroll is enabled, the posts will be loaded with little slide-up animation as you scroll down the page.

In all of these grid types, a comment count is included for each posts, along with post category, author name and date of publication.

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Footer Section:

The whole footer section is clearly divided into two areas. The top section contains the footer widgets and a menu, while the bottom section is designed for branding purpose. Not many theme have this kind of unique design I’m sure.

Footer widget areas:

The makers of the theme were generous while designing the footer. There are FIVE widget areas in here!

The first one takes the full width of the page all by itself. It’s more suitable to display a banner sized image here, perhaps for an advertisement.

The other four widget areas are put side-by-side below the first one, each taking a quarter of the screen. If 4 columns seems too much for the footer, you have the freedom to reduce the number of column to three, two, one or even zero (no footer widgets)!

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Footer menu area:

On the border of the two footer sections lies a menu area, where you can add any one of your menus.

Most themes provide the option to add a menu in the footer, but the speciality of the footer menu of Hueman is that, when you hover over a menu item containing a sub-menu, the sub-menu will open up in the upward direction with a slide-up animation (or may be it’s a roll-up animation, I’m not sure).

I think it’s a very cool and at the same time a much needed feature for a magazine site, as there will be many categories and sub-categories. Adding a category based menu here will really be helpful for the visitors to navigate within the website.

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Branding & credit section:

The bottommost section of the theme is specially designed to add a branding of your company or blog.

A logo can be added in this section floored by some texts, ideally copyright text or a tiny description of your blog, magazine or company.

The social menu (which you’ve used on other parts of the website) can also be displayed here too. It will take the right alignment, while the logo and the texts remains on the left.

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Other features:

There are some great other features of Hueman that I must mention.

1. At the top of the blog page, a featured post slider can be set up. But unfortunately you cannot select any specific posts for this section. Instead a number of latest posts (from all categories or any particular category) will be included in the slider.
2. Just below the footer menu, there is an “Up” button for bringing the visitors back to the top. I’m a big fan of this feature, to be honest.
3. When you link to page outside your website, it’s a good practice to open the page in a new tab. In almost every other theme, you have to do this manually for each links. But not in Hueman. You can automate this process here.
   Additionally, you can display a outbound link symbol () beside each links that gives an indication to the visitors that “this link will take you to another website”. Needless to say, this will also be done automatically for all outbound links.
4. When you use auto excerpt, you can set the number of words to be used as the excerpt. This can potentially solve the previously mentioned problem with the white spaces in Two columns classical grid layout.
5. The background colour for almost every section can be set separately. So you can give your website any colour combination you want with this theme.
6. One cool and much needed feature it offers is that, the images are loaded as you scroll. This makes the website much faster to load, since the images which are at invisible at first are not loaded initially.

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How it handles smaller screens:

As I said before, Hueman is a 100% mobile friendly theme. In fact it deals with smaller screens so well that the overall ease of usability is not compromised at all! Some of the changes you’ll see on smaller screens are:

• The header menus are replaced by sets of three horizontal stacked lines, and the menus will open on click with a slide-in animation.
• The sidebars are replaced by arrow kind of symbols. They will also open on click with a slide-in animation.
• The footer menu behaves similar to the header menus.
• For all menus, you can turn on the option where the sub-menus will open only on click.
• All the contents in the credit section of the footer will be aligned centrally, so it looks good on mobile devices.

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Negatives:

Shockingly I could not think of any negative side of this theme. Specially for a choosy person like me, it’s really a surprise that I could not find any feature that needs improvements. No wonder more than 80,000 websites are being powered by this theme.

Although there has been many complaints from the users of this theme that, they have found this theme to be slow loading.

Other than this complain, this theme is clean! Perhaps you can help me with it. If you find any such field that you think needs improvements, feel free to mention it in the comment section below.

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Download and other links:

I believe the best way to learn about a theme is to try it yourself. But I understand this will not always be possible, specially for an already made website. That’s why there is the demo version.

Visit the Hueman theme demo here demo-hueman.presscustomizr.com

For using the free version of the theme in your WordPress.org website, all you need to do is go to the theme directory from your wp-admin panel and search for “Hueman”.

But you can also download the theme from wordpress.org/themes/hueman

If you want to try the Hueman pro version, go to presscustomizr.com/hueman-pro where you will get a link to purchase the pro version.

For your information, Hueman theme is only available in WordPress.org theme directory. You cannot use this theme on a WordPress.com website, not even in any paid plan.

I hope this review was able to help you make an informed decision about choosing theme. If you liked this review, I humbly invite you to read the WordPress Theme Review Series in my personal blogsite Ulta Palta Blogs.

Thank you for taking your time and reading this long review. Let me know what you think about this theme in the comment section below.

Note: It is recommended to install the Nimble Page Builder plug-in if you use the theme Hueman in your website, as it is optimized to work well with this theme. Moreover you can make any custom page with the help of the drag & drop builder of this plug-in. For me, the overall experience of this builder was very satisfactory.