Northeme: A Suite of Professional WordPress Themes for Creatives and Designers

Northeme is an outfit who have been creating WordPress themes since 2012. Its likely you may already be familiar with some of their work, thanks to the popularity of their free Workality Lite template.

The Workality Lite WordPress theme has been downloaded close to 80,000 times and is a great choice for creating a responsive portfolio website for creative professionals. However, if you want more features and functionality from your WordPress themes, you can upgrade to the commercial Workality Plus or one of the other premium templates from Northeme.

In this article, we will be taking a look at the WordPress themes on offer from Northeme, as well as reviewing one of their commercial templates in more detail. By the end of this guide, you will have hopefully been introduced to some interesting WordPress themes and be closer to selecting a final template for your next online project.

WordPress Themes from Northeme

Before we get into the review of the flagship Madrigal theme from Northeme, let’s take a quick look at their portfolio to see what they have to offer.

Centreal Plus

Centreal Plus is an ideal theme for anyone with a portfolio of images, photos, and other graphics they’d like to display online. If you are a professional photographer, this theme could be perfect for helping to generate more leads for your business.

As well as the homepage of your site, each of your inner pages can also feature large full-screen images. This effect can work really well at helping your content connect with your target audience and in turn, send more clients your way. There are some excellent portfolio page templates on offer, each of which gives you access to a range of layouts for presenting your content.

You’ll also find full WooCommerce support should you ever need to sell and collect payments for your products and services from your website.

Experience the Centreal Plus demo

Reframe Plus

The themes from Northeme are generally very clean in design and appearance. However, Reframe Plus is especially so and would, therefore, be a great match for anyone seeking a minimalistic template for their website.

Reframe Plus would be best suited to those looking for a way to showcase their work online, in a virtual portfolio. However, the blog post templates make this product a good choice for minimalistic bloggers who prefer to let their content do the talking. If you want to add a blog to your creative portfolio website, then these two features combine to great effect.

Reframe Pus includes a built-in slider tool for creating content slideshows, as well as a gallery and lightbox image presentation feature to really let your content stand out.

Experience the Reframe Plus demo

Workality Plus

Workality Plus is another theme that is focused on building an online portfolio for creatives. This WordPress theme includes a great selection of page templates. These prebuilt templates can be used to display your portfolio items in a range of different ways, as well as presenting the inventory from your optional WooCommerce-powered online shop with a selection of different layouts.

As mentioned earlier, there’s also a lite version of the Workality theme available. You can start using this free theme today and get a better sense of how the templates from Northeme perform.

Experience the Workality Plus demo

Madrigal WordPress Theme Review

Madrigal is best described as the flagship WordPress theme from Northeme. It’s a minimal and modern WordPress theme with a clean design. The lack of clutter not only helps your content to stand out on the page but also ensures your site and its pages load as quickly as possible.

In this Madrigal WordPress theme review, we’ll take a look at the main features on offer, as well as exploring how easy it is to setup and use in order to build a custom website.

Madrigal WordPress Theme Features

One key feature of Madrigal, which we will look at in more detail shortly, is the setup process. This feature aims to make it as easy as possible to get your website up and running. However, we’ll find out if that really is the case in a second, after we’ve looked at the core features.

Some of the highlights of the Madrigal WordPress theme include:

• Custom post type creator tool
• Custom grid layout manager
• Optional predefined custom post types
• Full-screen post and page covers
• Prebuilt and custom color skins
• Ability to set background, text, and border colors for individual posts and pages
• Ajax navigation for seamless page loading
• Range of page templates
• Built-in slider and gallery tools

As you can see, Madrigal gives you access to plenty of tools for building a personalized website with WordPress. Being able to create your own custom color skins is great. However, being able to give individual posts and pages their own color schemes is really impressive and not something that is seen very often.

The full-screen post and page covers work really well and make it easy for you to publish content that will make a big impact on your visitors. Each post can also feature a navigation button that makes it easy for your audience to scroll through the content on your site.

There’s also a pretty fancy effect that is used to display the main navigation menus, which you will have to see for yourself in order to fully appreciate.

You’ll also find full eCommerce support for creating an online shop, a selection of portfolio layouts, and some handy shortcodes for adding useful elements to your posts and pages.

All this is great, but the best features in the world aren’t enough to make a theme a good product. It also needs to be easy to use and perhaps most importantly, easy to install and setup. If you can’t get your website to look the way you want, then it doesn’t really matter how well the theme demo performs or what list of features you get access to.

So, let’s take a look at the Madrigal theme installation and setup process to see if this really is a template that can be recommended to both new and seasoned WordPress users alike.

Madrigal Theme Installation and Setup

The installation process for the Madrigal theme involves downloading the theme files from the Northeme website and then uploading them to your WordPress admin dashboard. After activating the theme, a handy link is displayed for launching the quick start guide that will help you get started.

You might notice from the above screenshot that the theme changes the font used by your WordPress admin area. I’m not sure how helpful this is, but the font does look nice. Once you are ready to get started, you are prompted to enter your account details, including a license key. Although you are free to skip this part and just get started on setting up the theme and building your website.

One really nice aspect of Madrigal and the other themes from Northeme is the auto setup feature. This feature allows you to get your website up and running as quickly as possible, resulting in a framework you can then populate with your own content.

The auto setup mode isn’t the only option, though. By choosing the quick start method, you can walk through each step of the setup process and add your personal information as you go. This includes setting up a maintenance page so that any visitors who reach your site will see a notification status message, rather than a half-finished website.

Through the rest of the setup process, you can choose which pages you want to create. This is achieved through a visual interface, making it very user-friendly, especially for those new to WordPress.

Other steps in the setup process include:

• Adding your logo image and logo text
• Choosing a prebuilt color skin or creating a custom skin
• Selecting a Google Font for the headers and body text on your site
• Picking a column layout for your content
• Configuring your social media links and icons
• Setting up the navigation menus
• Creating the placeholder content

This multi step setup process is a really nice touch. It makes it easy to get your website online while also ensuring you don’t miss any important tasks along the way. Furthermore, a progress bar is on display throughout the process, letting you know how far you’ve come and how much more you’ve left to do.

Once you are done with the setup process, there is a quick tour of the main features. Then it’s just up to you to start adding your own custom content to build out your website.

It’s great to see new WordPress users and those who haven’t installed a new theme from scratch before being catered for in this way. By making use of the quick start walkthrough guide, you can ensure your website up and running as quickly as possible, without ever feeling like you’ve been abandoned and left to work everything out for yourself.

Creating Custom Post Types

As well as being able to choose which custom post types are activated on your website through the theme setup process, you can also create your own later. Multiple post types make organizing and presenting the different types of content on your website much more efficient

For example, your additional post types could include news, reviews, recipes, or whatever best suits your website and the type of content you are publishing. Normally you would need to use an additional plugin to achieve this. However, the ability to create custom post types has been added to the theme.

From the Northeme control panel on your WordPress admin dashboard, you can access the custom post type manager and start creating your own. Each custom post type can have its own custom taxonomies to help organize that content more efficiently. All this takes place through an intuitive, user-friendly interface.

Your custom post types can all be managed from the theme’s control panel, making it easy to edit or even delete them at a later date.

Using the Grid Layout Manager

As well as the custom post type creator, the themes from Northeme also include a Grid Layout Manager tool. This feature allows you to create custom grid layouts for each of the custom post types on your site. Through the user interface, you can set the number of columns, thumbnail image size, and other layout settings.

The content from the custom post type you are creating the layout for, will be displayed according to the settings you’ve chosen. This includes the number of columns to use and how many posts to display. You can also create custom layouts for the individual posts, as well as choose whether to display related content at the end of each individual post.

It’s great to see this kind of functionality incorporated into the theme. Thanks to this, you now have a very easy way to setup custom post types, then create custom layouts to display the content from those post types.

As each of the themes from Northeme share the same underlying framework, you get access to this setup guide and the core features, no matter which of their commercial templates you choose.

Find out more about Madrigal and experience the demo today

Northeme Pricing

Apart from the popular and free Workality Lite, the WordPress themes from Northeme as available individually, for $49 each. However, by the far, the best value option is to join the Northeme club for $89 and gain access to all of their current products, plus any future releases.

However you choose to purchase these themes, you are free to use them on an unlimited number of sites and domains, including websites you build for your clients. Both of the purchase options include one year of access to support and theme updates. However, after that period, you can renew your license or continue to use the products unsupported.

There’s also a 30 day, no questions asked, money back guarantee in place. You can view the full details and FAQ for the pricing options here.

Final Thoughts on Northeme

Northeme has some really impressive WordPress themes in their portfolio. If you are seeking a truly multipurpose theme that is packed with all the latest commercial plugins and high-end features, these probably aren’t the themes for you.

However, if you are more interested in good looks and a clean, modern design, then the Northeme theme collection is well worth checking out. Not only do the sleek and minimalist designs ensure your website loads as quickly as possible, but they help deliver an easy to use interface while also letting your content take center stage.

Due to the current pricing details, you are probably better off signing up for the club package and getting access to all of the Northeme products. Each theme includes a feature that makes switching templates as painless as possible. Therefore, you will be free to change and test the design of your website without too much effort on your part.

If you are looking for a clean, modern, and stylish design for your WordPress website, then you should definitely explore the themes on offer from Northeme today.