Geeky Gadgets 

The Genesis Metro magazine theme has just been released.

Is it any good?

Let’s put it this approach… it’s the sort of theme that you examine and think… I have to find a site where I can use this theme, I have to.

I like the way the background knowledge image fades in slowly, I like the colours and the fonts, I like the proportions of the layout and the use of whitespace and I love the cheeky tiny gap between the content and the footer. (metro theme studiopress download)

My only downside is, I feel as though I’m being unfaithful because the former love of my life was the Minimum 2.0 theme and now it’s the Metro theme.

If you like what you see in the screenshot and you want to see more then head over to the Studiopress website and take a look round the Metro demo site.

Presenting Metro, a modern magazine-style layout built on an optimized mobile responsive foundation.

The spacious 1152 pixel-wide frame highlights your online publishing for a wide-screen world, and the sleek social features will help to build your visitors fast.

Brian Gardner – Studiopress

Metro’s fully widgetised homepage can make setup a doddle … drag and drop plus a little typing!

Don’t worry if you think that Metro’s homepage looks complicated to setup, because it’s fully widgetised and that means dragging and dropping a few widgets plus a bit of typing.

The Metro theme comes with a banging twelve widget areas!

I’ll run through them below and let you know where each and every one is and how to set it up.

Header right – the area to the correct of the site title. In the demo they’ve used a search widget.

Primary sidebar – the area for your primary sidebar content. You can use whatever widgets you similar here.

Secondary sidebar – this will only be used if you’re using stuff or pages with two sidebars. You can use whatever widgets you like here.

Subnav left – the area at the top to the left of the main tracking. In the demo they’ve made use of a text widget with “Like this theme? You can buy it at Studiopress”

Home top – the top featured post or featured page, which is set up using a Genesis Featured Post / Page widget.

Home middle left and Home middle right – the a couple of posts or pages that appear directly beneath the top featured post. They are both setup using Genesis Featured Post / Page widgets.

Home bottom – the bottom section in the main delighted area with the posts / pages arranged vertically. This is setup with Genesis Featured Post / Page widgets.

After post – this area only appears at the bottom of posts, it doesn’t appear on the homepage. On the demo site they’ve used a text widget and an eNews Extended widget.

Footer 1, Footer 2 and Footer 3 – these are the widget areas that make up your “fat footer”. You can use widgets of your choice to populate the footer.

Other things you have to do to perform the setup:

Background image – to set your background image go to Appearance > Background and choose your image. The background image used on the demo site is 1440px x 900px.

Colour scheme – for your choice of colour scheme go to Genesis > Theme Settings and choose your colour from the dropdown list.

Menus - the menus are WordPress customizable menus, which you can setup by going to Appearance > Menus.

Return to top and credits – the “return to top” and the “credits / login” after the footer are hard coded into the theme and can be easily changed using the Genesis Simple Edits plugin or the Genesis Widgetized Footer plugin.

That’s it folks – a fabulous looking homepage all set up utilising drag and drop plus a little typing, and all without touching a single line of code – don’t you just love Genesis!

Metro child theme comes with lots of useful and time saving features

Even a theme that looks as adept as Metro should have beneficial and time saving features, and Metro doesn’t disappoint.

Here are some of the qualities that Metro offers:

Mobile responsive – adapts to your visitors screen size and gives them the optimum viewing experience. A must-have feature to future-proof your website.

Five colour schemes – blue, green, orange, pink and red – something to suit all tastes.

Six layout options – various combinations of sidebar and content allow you to give each of your pages and posts individual styling.

Four page templates – archives, blog, columns and landing page templates.

Featured images – supports WordPress featured images.

Custom background and custom header – easily use your own custom background and custom header.

Fixed width – gives you pin-point control over the exact look of your site.

Theme options – allows you to control many of your theme options from within the WordPress admin area.

Metro theme sports the utilizing out-of-the-box features: 6 layout options, 5 colour styles, 3 story locations, fixed width, mobile responsive, after-post footer widget, landing page template, custom background.

Brian Gardner – Studiopress

If you’re looking for a modern mobile responsive WordPress theme that allows you to display lots of satisfied on your homepage, a theme that is easy to setup and has great CSS support for the various widgets, then the Metro theme is most appropriate for you.

If you like the look of Metro and you’d like to find out advice of pricing etc. head over to Studiopress and put the Metro news theme by its paces, see its features in action and… start intending that new website.