Sydney, built by Athemes, is a five-star rated WordPress template with more than 100k users. It is a business niche WP template compatible with the popular page builder Elementor. Is it a good alternative to popular themes available in the WP repository which are of the same niche or belong to a different niche but can be easily modeled into a business template? Is Sydney fast? Does it let you customize the footer, header, blog section, etc? Let’s find it out!
Sydney gets into action straightaway after you activate it. It shows a horizontal bar on its settings page with a welcome message and two buttons – starter sites and theme dashboard. If you click the starter sites button, it will install the “starter site” pack that features five free templates and 7+ Pro templates. The free sites are – main, fashion shop, lead generation, learning, and plumber. Some Pro packs are – cafe, construction, finance, original, and gardening. To install a starter site, move the mouse cursor on the site and click the “import” button.
At the top of the “starter sites” collection, you’ll find a category dropdown box. You can filter the “starter sites” by these categories – Business, Portfolio, eCommerce, and Events.
Sydney features a “Theme Dashboard” page that shows the free and pro features of the theme in a 2 x 8 grid. Each grid has a URL “customize”. When you click this link, you’ll see the list of new options in the WP live customizer and your website on the right side of the live customizer. Here are the various entries the template creates in the live customizer:
Header
This category has three sections – site identity, main header, and mobile header. The site identity section lets you change the site logo, set a tagline, specify logo height, and set the text logo color/font size and description color/font size.
The main header section has two parts – General and Style. In the General section, WP lets you change the header layout, set the menu position, specify the container type, enable the sticky header, enable/disable header elements, and activate the account/cart icons. The style section allows users to change the color of the following parts of the header:
- Text, background.
- Submenu and menu.
You can also set padding for the header from this section of Sydney. This template ships with five unique and beautiful header styles.
The mobile header section lets you select a mobile header layout. The live customizer tool boasts three layouts and a list of elements that the mobile header supports. This section also lets users activate two types of off-canvas modes. By default, layout one canvas mode is pre-selected. You can choose layout two if you want. Sydney enables you to change the hamburger menu icon and also enables you to set the space between links.
Hero area
The Hero section is an important section for any type of business website. In Sydney, you’ll find Hero options in these three categories – type, slider, and media. The template supports four front page Hero styles – Full-Screen slider, Image, and video. It also supports four site header types – full-screen slider, image, video, and no header.
This WP theme enables you to set a custom Hero slider speed. You can add and customize the sliders from the “live customizer” itself. You can configure Sydney to show the slider in full-screen or responsive mode on mobile devices. If you’ve enabled a video/image header for your website, you can specify the video or image from the “Header media” section.
Typography
You can change the “body” and “heading” font family/weight/style from the Typography section of this WP theme. You can also set the font’s line height and letter spacing from this section.
Blog
The Blog section lets users control the appearance of the archive pages and single posts. The theme supports six archive layouts. You can make it display a sidebar on the archive pages on the left and right sides of the posts appearing on the archive pages.
Sydney can show the “read more link” on the archive pages and enables you to specify the length of the post excerpt. It also allows you to hide/show post meta items and make the theme show the meta items above or below the post. Like the main header section, its Blog section is divided into two sub-sections. The options we’ve shared above appear in the first section. In the Style sub-section of the Blog section, you will find an option to change the post title, meta, meta color, and excerpt font size.
Footer
Sydney supports ten different footer layouts. It also enables you to change the footer container type and set a vertical alignment for the footer. It can display the footer on mobile devices or desktops and lets you change the footer background color, widget title color, links color, heading colors, etc. Sydney lets you enable the top divider and change the footer’s vertical section/column spacing. In its Footer section, you can also set the title size for the footer widgets. The WP theme also lets users customize the footer copyright area.
Colors
The color settings are grouped into these categories – general, links, heading, form fields, and sidebar. This WP template by Athemes lets users change the color of the items available in these sections – general, links, headings, form fields, and sidebar.
What features does Sydney Pro offer? The Pro edition of the template features a hook system and allows you to enable breadcrumbs. It also features a Wishlist system and product Swatch module. It comes with an extended WooCommerce module and offers extra header and footer options. Athemes, the developer of Sydney Pro (and the Botiga), has introduced three subscription plans for their template – Personal, Professional, and Agency. These three plans are priced at 69, 99, and 199 dollars.
Closing words: The template loads pretty fast in Firefox, Chrome, and Chrome-based browsers. Although it is labeled as a business theme, we found that it is suitable for building all types of websites. The reason for the same is the options in the live customizer. You will find 50+ options in the live customizer when Sydney is active.
