*This post has been updated as of December 10, 2018*
*UPDATE: I have been receiving more comments from upset Luminous Themes customers. Apparently, their customer support has been brutal over the past year or so. I’m not sure what the current state of the company is so, at this point, I recommend you avoid working with the company. If you are looking for quality Weebly themes from a reliable company, Webfire Themes is your best bet at this point.*
You’ve heard me preach about how great Weebly is for quite some time now. And I will continue to do so, until I CONVERT THE MASSES.
However, one of the disadvantages of Weebly has been their poor choices of themes. They just didn’t have the same level of quality that their competitors had. Squarespace, WordPress, even Wix was blowing them out of the water.
Thankfully, Weebly made some big upgrades to their themes with their massive Weebly 4 update.
That said, sometimes you still just need a little something extra. And that’s where third party Weebly themes come into play.
I’ve covered some of my favorite Weebly theme providers already, with full reviews on Webfire Themes and Baamboo Studio. Today, we look at a relatively new player on the scene, Luminous Themes.
Initial thoughts
Luminous Themes might have the best looking website out of any of the theme developers I’ve reviewed to date. It’s clean, simple, makes great use of images and graphics, and flows perfectly as you scroll down.
Most importantly, it has all of the info you need right on the single page you land on. No need to click around to different pages to find the info you’re looking for.
Everything looks great, and theeeeennn we get to the bottom of the page.
Oof. Use of unlicensed stock photos on your main website? Not a great start Luminous…
But, enough nitpicking.
Themes quality
The first thing I noticed is that Luminous has a much smaller selection to choose from. With a total of just 3 themes, that puts them behind Webfire’s 11 and Baamboo Studio’s 9.
But you know what? That’s ok. Because while those other developers may have more to choose from, I would actually only consider purchasing about half of them. The others are just too out-of-date.
Quality over quantity, friends. Every time.
I’ve personally used Luminous themes in websites I’ve built for clients, and the quality is definitely there.
These templates have all of the features you’d come to expect from a website template. Slideshows, video headers, parallax backgrounds, etc.
But one of the coolest features I found was the preset individual page templates. If you have a difficult time getting creative with your web design, these page templates can be very helpful.
While the other developers have something similar, it mainly consisted of different custom headers. The Luminous themes go the extra mile and customize the entire page for you.
And, of course, you can try out a live demo of all themes before buying.
And at $39, Luminous Themes are among the most affordable on the market.
There are no separate licenses, either. Just one purchase allows you to use the theme as much as you’d like. Web designers rejoice!
“One Flow”
Luminous touts this unique feature called “One Flow”.
It describes it as such:
Ethereal is powered by the latest and greatest in web technology. It was crafted with pixel-perfect design technology, and with OneFlow, your website will look simply stunning on all devices. Over 60% of website visitors come from mobile, and Google favors websites with responsive design. That’s why Ethereal is the perfect choice to boost your business.
From what I can see, it is essentially their own marketing lingo for responsive website design. As such, it is obviously not a feature unique to Luminous Themes.
Kudos to marketing lingo, though!
Ease of use
One of the best features of Weebly is its simplicity and ease of use.
Naturally, you’d want to use themes that preserve that simplicity. At least, as much as possible. Otherwise, you may as well get into building a custom WordPress site.
Fortunately, Luminous Themes does a great job of keeping things simple. While it doesn’t quite hit the high bar of simplicity that Baamboo Studio offers, it does have some unique features.
Like I mentioned earlier, those individual page templates will be a life-saver for many. While most theme developers merely help with changing up the header on each page, Luminous Themes provides different templates for the entire page.
For those who lack that creative spark, this will be most welcome feature.
And, if you’re going to go through the trouble of using 3rd party Weebly themes, you will need to mess around with a little bit of code at some point.
This is where Luminous does something that I haven’t seen from any other developer…
The main reason you would ever need to mess around with code is to change the colors of the little things, such as buttons and links.
It can be pretty frustrating searching through lines and lines of code to find where you need to make these changes.
Luminous Themes lets you know what the color settings are for pretty much everything right at the beginning, bunching it all together before the lines of code start.
This makes it much easier to then search through the lines of code. Now that you know what the color settings are, you can just search for that color in the search feature at the top, and make the necessary changes. (I hope I explained that properly!)
Love it.
Like a good developer should, Luminous provides full instructions and step-by-step guides with the purchase of every theme.
It’s all there.
There’s even a section to report bugs, if you happen to run into any.
Support
Even with the best instructions, guides, and tips and tricks, there will be times you will need customer support.
Now, I need to be honest here. I haven’t had much experience with Luminous Themes’ customer support. Mainly, because I haven’t needed it.
While that is great for obvious reasons, the downside is that I don’t have much to share with you regarding Luminous Themes’ support.
The correspondence I have had with them has been very timely.
Also, they have this support section located on their website:
I setup an account to check it out. What I found was, to say the least, lacking…
*tumble weeds roll through*
It’s possible that this is a new feature that Luminous Themes is working on but, if that’s the case, there is no sense in having this up on the website right now. It just looks bad as is.
Again, all actual communication I have had with Luminous Themes has been great. Perhaps they are a bit old-fashioned and simply prefer email.
Overall review
While Luminous Themes is a newer player in the market of 3rd party Weebly themes, they have a lot going for them. Great quality themes that are simple to use is what’s most important here.
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However, there is definitely room for some improvement. More selection of themes and a better knowledge base would go a long way towards instilling more confidence in prospective buyers.
All said, I would still recommend their products, and will continue to use them in my own website design projects.
