Newspaper Theme Review

Newspaper is a beautiful news theme created by tagDiv, an Envato Power Elite author, with the publishing industry in mind. Built to handle large amounts of content, Newspaper features a bold and elegant design combined with the power of versatility. Loaded with features dedicated to making the website’s look professional, Newspaper is a must-have template for beginners, but also for advanced WordPress users. Newspaper by tagDiv is the most popular and also the best-selling WordPress news theme of all time on themeforest.net by Envato Market.

Design

Combining a clean, structured grid system with stylish architecture, Newspaper is an impressive and one-of-a-kind theme. Designed with your audience in mind, responsive & retina ready to the core, this template offers you a multitude of options dedicated to small screen devices. Starting with the latest version, Newspaper allows you to choose how your content will be displayed on individual devices (desktop, mobile, tablets), according to your will.

With Newspaper, you don’t have to be a web designer to create a beautiful news website.
Whether you want to take the time to enjoy building your new site from scratch, or run the theme right away and redesign the website with the speed of light, the Newspaper template is an excellent choice. It comes with over 56 amazing pre-made demo designs.

This means that Newspaper saves you from the hassle of searching and testing to find the right design. The author has packed the theme with dozens of pre-built sites you can choose from. Newspaper comes with a custom importing system, so you can preview a demo and install it with a simple click. You can load the demo with content or just the design. If you decide to uninstall it, the import system will clear the website of any demo elements, leaving your pages just like they were before the changes.

Newspaper is built to give you the perfect balance between the elements used on a page. Since the launch of the version 8, Newspaper brings you a brand new page builder, called tagDiv Composer. Light and fast, it lets you edit your pages right on the front end just by dragging and dropping the elements where your heart desires. To make everything even easier, you can make complex CSS customization with just a few clicks.

Arranging and styling each element is now a piece of cake, so you won’t need any help or coding skills to make your dream come true. With this powerful live editing tool, you can build astonishing pages. tagDiv Composer makes your website an infinite playground where you can test your ideas, as it comes with a variety of options, challenging your creativity to push the limits. Furthermore, with the Newspaper 8.5 version comes included a tailor-made plugin called tagDiv Multipurpose which allows you to create beautiful landing pages.

Newspaper brings various header, footer, and top bar styles, that will allow you to fine-tune the important branding areas of your site. Moreover, every page can now easily become an excellent footer area to define the bottom of your website. This template also lets you set a general color scheme for the entire site, or just for a specific section.

Designed to help you build an engaging site effortlessly, the theme gives you dozens of post layouts, countless big grid style combinations, category templates, and 25 predefined blocks. There’s also a new Flex Block that brings extra flexibility and lets you publish articles without constraints, and can be highly customized. You can emphasize the Above the fold area by using Big Grids displayed in full-width size. Custom built features like the image slider gallery, images lightbox effect, social counter, news ticker, video playlists, weather and exchange widgets, will give your website a professional touch.

The Newspaper template is social friendly and allows you to keep the visitors engaged with your website through different networks. You can choose from a list of 37 social networks, like Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, VKontakte, YouTube, and so on.

A great way to attract visitors is to harness the power of typography on your pages. Newspaper opens new perspectives with Google, Adobe Typekit or Custom Fonts, giving you the opportunity to capture and enchant the visitor’s attention. Furthermore, the tagDiv Composer has recently introduced a Fonts Style tab that lets you create custom typography for every block or element present. You can combine beautiful fonts, size, or line height. The process is easy, without involving code knowledge, or extra font customization plugins that may slow down your website’s performance.

To make monetizing easier, the author has implemented a modern, intelligent ad system that allows you to generate revenue from advertisements without downgrading the reader’s experience. 18 ad spots are ready to be used in the header, footer, article, smart list, and sidebar areas. They can become active just by placing the AdSense or HTML code in the theme’s ad spot.

Another helpful tool is the Translation Panel, which helps you load one of the dozens of translations available and automatically convert a list of strings.

Functionality

All the options, settings, plugins, demos, and website monitoring systems are gathered in a single place, the Newspaper Theme Panel. Neatly, clear and intuitively organized, all the theme’s options are very easy to use.

When the tagDiv author launched the Newspaper 8 version a few months ago, there’s been a major change regarding the main functionality, that’s constantly being improved. Besides other plugins available on the market, the Newspaper theme author developed an intuitive page builder – tagDiv Composer. It is specially crafted for blogs, news, and magazine websites, with dedicated features, giving you a unique way to build pages. Moreover, all the changes you make are happening live! The tagDiv Composer is a highly optimized plugin, designed to work seamlessly with the Newspaper theme to give you performance and reliability.

Even more flexible and versatile, Newspaper incorporates the tagDiv Multi-Purpose plugin that lets you build creative landing pages for your business. This plugin is interchangeable with the tagDiv Composer page builder, and there’s a section where you can find the new multipurpose shortcodes. You can use full-width pages because Newspaper theme allows you to pick a wider layout on any row you want. Moreover, you can mix rows and get the visual appeal you’re seeking for. There’s a library of 22 new content elements that you can find within the tagDiv Composer plugin. From custom and reusable templates, one-page functionality, to image & video parallax, and gradient colors for a more vivid building experience, Newspaper has got you covered.

Newspaper 8.7 brings you five premium plugins: tagDiv Composer, tagDiv Social Counter, tagDiv Multi-Purpose, tagDiv AMP, tagDiv Newsletter. Also, the theme is bundled with the Revolution Slider, tagDiv Mobile Theme, and Visual Composer plugins.

With the Newsletter Plugin, you can keep your audience up to date. It comes with over eight beautiful designs, so you can easily adapt it to your website appearance. The tagDiv Newsletter plugin is compatible with the MailChimp, Mailerlite, and Feedburner campaign providers.

Furthermore, the theme was tested and works smoothly with the WP Super Cache, Contact Form 7, bbPress, BuddyPress, Font Awesome 4 Menus, Jetpack, WooCommerce, SEO by Yoast and WP User Avatar plugins.

Newspaper also comes with a custom plugin to help you show off your social networks stats – the Social Counter, and two special social image widgets (Instagram and Pinterest). Besides, the tagDiv author created 35 more custom widgets, which you can easily drag into your website’ sidebar to highlight the most important things for your audience.

Performance

Since the 8.7 version, Newspaper is AMP ready, giving you new ways of improving your website performance. The theme raises the standards on page loading speed and mobile optimization through the specially crafted tagDiv AMP plugin.

We have tested the Newspaper default demo on different page speed tests, and it loads the content at high speed. This theme has an extensive documentation with a search option and video tutorials to help you achieve performance and optimize your website.

Downsides

Newspaper theme has a multitude of available settings allowing users to customize almost every element and section of the template, but this diversity can be overwhelming for WordPress beginners. Due to the highly numerous options, it may take you a bit to get used to the Theme’s way of giving you access to customization settings, but once you do… Well, you’ll know what I mean.

Newspaper Theme has no RTL support.