The Education Theme puts you at the head of the Class [Review]

The StudioPress Education Theme isn’t just for colleges and universities! You’ll earn top grades for your business or freelance website with Education.

Education is a WordPress child theme that works with the Genesis Framework.

Like the Eleven40 Theme, Education is wider than normal. It’s also mobile responsive, so it looks good on any size screen. It comes with:

1. 6 Preset theme color schemes
2. 6 Layout options
3. Custom background capability
4. Mobile responsive
5. Lots of other great features

The Home Page

Education includes widgetized areas to set up a distinctive scrolling home page. These include:

• Full-width Slider
• “Intro” area for a brief but very prominent message
• “Featured” area

You don’t have to use any of them — you can use your home page as a blog page — or you can pick and choose which ones you want to show.

When you take advantage of these widgetized areas, you can really get your most important messages in front of readers fast.

Slider

The slider lets you grab readers’ attention with a series of full-width rotating images. In the theme demo, they show scenes from the college campus. On a client site I’m working on now, the topic is healthy feet, so her images show attractive feet being pampered with massage, aromatherapy and special soaks.

Intro

The intro area gives you a place for a brief message you want all your site visitors to see. It’s an excellent place for a tagline, a brief mission statement or statement of purpose.

Featured

The featured area lets you showcase four featured pages, with or without images. In the theme demo, they chose “Admissions,” “Student Life,” “Sports” and “Location.”

My foot-care client features four broad categories of foot care.

Call to Action

Here’s where you ask people to opt in to your email list or go to a featured product or service.

Page Layout and Sidebars

Education gives you six page layout options:

• No sidebar
• Single sidebar on either the left or the right
• Two sidebars. These can be on the left and right, or you can put both on the left or both on the right

The primary sidebar in this theme is pretty standard, but the secondary sidebar really stands out. Color-coordinated with the site’s background color, it really draws attention.

In the demo, they’ve set up the secondary sidebar on the right. My client has it on the left, with the primary sidebar on the right for a very elegant look.

The theme also gives you a 3-column footer.

General Impressions

Education is a wide, mobile responsive theme with elegant home page features and a unique set of sidebars. It’s being used successfully by a Chamber of Commerce, a printing company, a company that puts together nutritious meals and a tourism board, among many other types of businesses.

Do your homework — the Education theme [aff] might just earn your website an A+.

Note: This review is for the Education theme. Since it was written, Education has been replaced with Education Pro, which includes slight design changes, and adds HTML5 markup.