In this new WordPress theme review, we will be talking about the Smarty premium WordPress theme which was designed to help you create a website for any educational institution. Whether it's a kindergarten, a primary school, a high school or a college and even more so a university, this theme is intended to be the solution you are looking for.
In this review we'll cover several of its aspects by talking about its features, overall appearance, layout, customization options, and other features. All this in order to offer you the opportunity not only to discover more deeply this theme, but also to make him your companion in the creation of this type of website.
What you need to know about the Smarty WordPress theme
The Smarty WordPress theme was created by the team Stylemixthemes of which we have already offered many reviews. This team offers many themes in different niches, although they also have a versatile theme in their portfolio. But overall their themes generally focus on specific niches and the Smarty WordPress theme is no exception to what has become a rule at Stylemixthemes.
As mentioned at the start of this review, Smarty was designed to help you build a website to promote an educational institution or any educational institution. It is a sufficiently flexible and flexible theme to allow you to personalize your website according to the type of educational project you offer.
Whether it's creating a website for your school or college, this theme will give your students all the information they'll need to get the most out of their studies. It also gives you the opportunity to create a website to promote online courses. It is therefore an all in one solution that you will have to visit.
Some basic features of the Smarty WordPress theme
To help you create a successful website for your educational institution, the Smarty WordPress theme offers many features. We will not list them all here, but we will talk about the main ones to give you a quick overview of what to expect, if you acquire this beautiful theme.
- 3 demos dedicated respectively to kindergartens, primary schools and university.
- 18 internal page templates that showcase different services your institution offers
- 4 customizable color schemes
- 4 different header styles
- Compatible with several modern browsers
- A calendar section
- Customization with real-time preview
- Available Profile section
- Full integration with Visual Composer
- Compatible with Visual Composer
- Excellent typography
- WooCommerce Support
- Perfect management of audio and video files
- 100% responsive layout
- Section dedicated to the collection of donations
- Multilingual thanks to WPML plugin support
- Regular updates
- Detailed documentation
- Tools for publishing testimonials
- Compatible with many WordPress plugins
- Available 24 / 7 Customer Support
- And many others
This WordPress theme also requires many plugins to work exactly as you see on different demos. Among these we will mention among others:
- Revolution Slider
- WPBakery Visual Composer
- Breadcrumb NavXT
- Contact Form 7
- STM Configuration
- MailChimp
Where to get this theme?
To get this theme, simply visit ThemeForest at: Smarty - Kindergarten, School, High school, College, University WordPress theme.
Then you only have to click on the button Buy Now and to acquire from you all the financial and informational obligations relating to it, finally to come into possession of the latter.
But above all, we generally advise any user to consult the different demos offered by the themes, to form their own opinion. If you want to do it, just click the button Live Preview.
Smarty WordPress Theme Demos
The Smarty WordPress theme is very popular in this niche, because it represents a complete solution that targets any type of educational institution. And to demonstrate it, it offers 3 functional and complete demos to have a global overview on what you can achieve with this theme.
For now the developers of this theme do not say if in the near future, we will be entitled to new demos. But whatever the case, those already present offer everything you need. In addition they are all customizable.
Kindergarden
The Kindergarden demo specializes in the creation of websites for kindergartens, nurseries and daycares. It is complete and functional, and has a home page, which displays a magnificent slide show that can highlight the elements that make the strength of your educational institution.
Its easy and intuitive handling is possible, thanks to the native integration of plugins, which provide everything you need to customize your website.
School
The School demo will help you create a website for any primary school. It will not only help you to present your institution, but also to integrate into your website a powerful LMS dedicated to the management of your learners, your courses, your quizzes and others.
Several features that are not least are also included, simply to tell you that this theme is not to be overlooked. It perfectly supports the multilingual, which will allow you to reach foreign students.
University
It is the most complete demo and comes with a visually intuitive, well structured, easy to use, very engaging and modern look. Its name perfectly describes what it is designed for.
It brings amazing flexibility and tons of premium features, made to measure to make your website attractive. This demo uses SEO best practices and clean code to deliver performance and stability to your website.
First step with the Smarty WordPress theme
In this section, we consider that you have already deployed your theme on your FTP. So, we will skip the different steps of the installation of WordPress, to start us directly from the choice of theme.
Go to the section of Dashboard - Appearance - Theme and choose the theme Smarty, then click Enable.
If you want to keep the changes you make to the theme, use its child theme instead Smart Child Theme.
1 - Validation of the license
Once the theme is activated, go to the new Smarty menu and click on it. You will have a page that will ask you to enter the license of this theme in the section reserved for this purpose. Enter it and if this key is valid, you will have a small green tick that will appear next to the field. Your theme will be ready to receive the latest updates, as well as those of its plugins.
But before continuing, check the status of your system to see if the system has the required configurations that allow it to run this WordPress theme perfectly. Go to the System Status tab.
Yellow notifications tell you exactly what's missing in your environment and what to do about it.
2 - Activation of plugins
Go to the Plugins tab, install and activate all required and recommended plugins.
NB If you do not install them, some features may be missing, which will make the user experience incomplete.
2 - Installing the demo
If you're new, getting started with a demo is one of the ideal solutions. This process allows you to have all the layouts, pages and demo contents of this theme. It also leaves you to focus solely on the content of your website and a little less on its personalization.
To do it go on the tab install Demos
You will find 3 different demos. Just choose the one that seems close to your activity and click on Import.
Wait until the installation of all plugins and demo content is complete. This process may take a long time, depending on the speed of your connection.
Key Features of Smarty WordPress Theme
4 color schemes
The four predefined color schemes that you will find in the Smarty theme make it easy to quickly change the overall look of your website. You will undoubtedly find a game that will match the branding of your educational institution or business.
However, if not, you will have the option of easily changing them or creating your own color scheme using the customization options of the Smarty WordPress theme.
4 header styles
Navigation is arguably the most important aspect of any website. Therefore, it is good to see that the Smarty WordPress theme offers four different styles of header.
Its styles cover not only the navigation and menu area but also the main layout and design of the header area of the homepage.
Having a selection of header styles will help you choose the one that will best assure you of the visibility of your website header information. In addition to these four styles of headers, you also have the option to create your own using the Customizer tool built into this theme.
100% responsive layout
The layouts of this theme are designed perfectly to meet this challenge.
They are responsive and behave in a user-friendly way on multiple screens of mobile devices and browsers.
3 footer styles
In addition to the selection of headers, it also has three styles of footer. Again, you are not limited to these predefined styles. You can always create your own styles.
However, by combining the different predefined elements that make up this theme, you should be able to create a unique look to your educational institution website.
Many models de layouts
To help you add essential pages to your website, the Smarty theme incorporates a varied selection of page templates and layouts. These layouts cover the pages that your website will need. Among others: the model dedicated to the FAQ, the canteen, camps, athletics and sport, transport, and many others.
As we will see below, this theme has a handy tool that makes customizing these page templates and layouts a breeze.
Visual Composer to create and customize your pages intuitively
Thanks to the integration of the Visual Composer plugin, you will have access to a drag and drop page builder. When creating or configuring your website, Visual Composer will make it easier to modify the content of the demo or its layouts and page templates, which will allow you to give your website a personalized look. more suited to your project.
Visual Composer is one of the best selling page builder plugins in WordPress. It's great to see it included for free in this package.
Revolution Slider to create your impressive slideshow
If you check out the Smarty theme demo, you will notice that these show animated slideshows. These animated slideshows will perfectly present your most important information, whether you open your website or your homepage.
The pre-built animated slideshows that you will find in the Smarty theme demo content are powered by the Slider Revolution plugin. This is a powerful slideshow maker plugin that lets you create sliders - advanced slideshows - to help your website not only grab your visitors' attention, but also display important information.
WordPress Smarty theme customization options
If you need to customize the layout and theappearance of your website, much of the work takes place with the use of the WordPress Live Customizer. With the Live Preview feature, you'll be able to instantly see the effect your changes have had on your website.
These customizations cover changing color schemes, choosing a header style, configuring the footer, controlling typography settings, and much more. These customization options help make Smarty a flexible tool for creating the website you want.
Calendar tool
If you want to help your students get to class on time or share information about open days with new students, the Smarty theme tool dedicated to timetable publications will certainly come in handy. This feature is based on a plugin integrated natively into the theme, and which provides all the tools you will need to publish schedules, or time periods with responsive looks.
Creating a time job on your website will be relatively simple. With a user-friendly and professional interface, adding custom columns, entering periods and schedules, adding information about each session will be very easy.
You can even add filters so that your potential students or parents can quickly find the information they are looking for. It is a very versatile tool. So no matter what kind of information you want to present, you really shouldn't run into any issues.
Teacher Profile Sections and Class Descriptions
The Smarty WordPress theme has a very useful profile section for your educational institution's staff. Using the custom post type Teacher, you will be able to quickly create profiles for all of your teaching staff.
This WordPress theme also has an attractive page template that will display the list of different profiles. The advantage this brings is the fact that it will allow visitors to quickly see the staff list, before exploring each profile individually.
Event Management
Most educational institutions organize events. Whether these events are open houses, social events, fundraisers, or other types of gatherings, a good website should promote them to the community.
The WordPress Smarty theme therefore has for this, a function dedicated to the management of these. It makes it easy to upload and publish information on your website. All in an ideal and friendly look for your visitors.
The pages dedicated to each event allow you to publish all the information you need to help your visitors. This includes the event description, important information such as time, date and contact information, a Google map that shows the location of the event venue, a downloadable brochure or other files, and an online registration form.
Donations and fundraising
If you want to raise funds for your school, or university, the section dedicated to donations of this theme will help you achieve your goals. More than just a fundraiser, this feature allows you to create multiple fundraising projects.
Each donation project gives you the opportunity to provide information about the cause, helping to increase the chances of your visitors making a donation.
When creating a fundraising project, you have the option of setting an amount, entering a deadline and of course providing all the essential information and details of the project.
Full eCommerce Support
If you want to sell products or charge for access to your courses directly from your website, that's okay with the Smarty theme. With full support for the popular WooCommerce plugin, listing products and services for sale, and collecting payments, will be very easy.
WooCommerce and Smarty provide you with everything you need to create an online store which will work wonderfully well.
Pricing
The WordPress Smarty theme is available on ThemeForest for a whopping $ 59 $. An offer that includes unlimited lifetime access to theme updates and customer support for 6 months. This period can be extended from 6 to 12 months for an additional $ 17,70.
Last Thoughts
Using the Smarty theme to create a website for a business or an educational organization is very easy. Importing demo content really only takes a few clicks. The WordPress Live Customizer makes it simple to customize theappearance of your website; while Visual Composer gives you the ability to make more advanced changes to your website.
Smarty definitely has a modern and professional appearance. If you think it has the right look for your project, then, as you can see in this review, it also has the features you will need to make your website a successful platform.
In addition, and as is often the case with StyleMixThemes, the demo content that is embedded is not dummy. It is content that can be used in full. This greatly differentiates it from the majority of WordPress themes which offer text generated by lipsum.com.
This is simply a theme that you will need to use if you want to start a business in this area.
