Description
Review of Ali Abdaal Original Ghost Theme developed by Super Themes Co.
You’ve probably heard of this Ghost theme. It’s one of the most popular templates used to create stunning websites. Ali Abdaal, a superstar YouTuber and Productivity coach with years of experience, designed this Ghost template which was then developed and coded by Dan Rowden.
Dan Rowden is known for creating high-quality themes that are both stylish and easy to use. This Ghost template is no exception. This template is perfect for bloggers who want a professional-looking website without having to spend hours coding it themselves.
Best of all, Dan Rowden continuously updates the Ghost theme to ensure it’s keeping up with the latest trends. So if you’re looking for a theme that will always be up-to-date, this Ghost theme is worth considering.
Introduction to Ali Abdaal Original Ghost Theme
This article is an introduction to Ali Abdaal Original Ghost theme. It’s a powerful blogging and newsletter theme designed by Ali and then coded by Dan Rowden for his site.
The template is easily customizable (both with theme settings and CSS) and supports all types of Ghost content. It also offers content “hubs” for your main topics, plus a standalone newsletter page ready for email publishing. And if that needed to be more, the template works with memberships and paid content via Ghost’s Portal or custom membership pages.
Finally, the theme comes with a built-in commenting tool so that you can keep track of all the conversations around your content.
Who Is Ali Abdaal?
Let us provide some context if you don’t know of him. Ali Abdaal is a successful YouTuber with more than 3.5 million subscribers and more than 500,000 followers on Instagram.
Essentially, he is an ex-doctor who has made it big online and become a productive entrepreneur.
He teaches productivity classes on Skillshare and sells essential products like journals, planners, and more on his website. He covers tech reviews, health and productivity advice, and lifestyle talks as a YouTuber.
He also publishes a weekly newsletter called Sunday Snippets using this Ghost theme that we’re about to look at in detail.
The Developer Behind the Theme: Dan Rowden
Dan Rowden, a 36-year-old developer, and designer from Finland, designed this theme. He has an impressive track record in web design and development.
He is an officially certified Ghost expert and has created multiple custom themes for Ghost blogging platform. Besides that, he has worked with notable names like Ali Abdaal, Balaji Srinivasan, and Dave Nemetz.
Along with designing and developing websites and themes for Ghost, Dan runs Gloat (a Ghost hosting service) and Cove Chat (a Ghost commenting tool).
He owns Super Themes Co and has developed more than seven innovative Ghost templates. All of his templates are responsive and esthetically pleasing. They also offer excellent performance, SEO optimization options, and compatibility with all major browsers.
Performance of this Powerful Blogging and Newsletter Theme for Ghost
Ali Abdaal’s Ghost Theme is a lightweight and fast theme designed for bloggers and newsletter publishers.
It has a desktop Google PageSpeed Insights score of 91 and a performance grade of A on GTmetrix.
However, it scored a low 78 on Pingdom with a grade of C.
The total page size is 847 KB, which loads under 842 ms and sends 33 requests.
Page Quality
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO AUDIT
Features of the Blogging Theme designed by Ali
Let’s look at some of the features that Ali and Dan have included in this beautiful blogging template.
First and foremost, it is a beautifully designed blogging template that will give your website a distinct look and feel. Additionally, it supports content hub pages with editable introduction content. These hub pages are perfect for creating an attractive landing page for your website or blog, as well as for including a comprehensive archive of your past articles on the same topic.
The theme also includes a newsletter landing page and archive. Plus, it supports free and paid memberships via Ghost’s Portal or built-in membership pages. This feature provides a great way to monetize your website or blog by offering premium content to your readers.
Finally, the theme is fully translatable in any language. You can easily edit colors and settings to match your specific needs. It also supports multiple authors, making it an excellent option for collaborative projects.
Customizing Ali Abdaal's Ghost Template for Your Website
Customizing the theme to your website preferences is a breeze. For example, you can easily change the accent and background colors to fit your brand or color palette. You can also get creative by uploading a custom YouTube video to appear on the homepage! And if you want to showcase your work, you can use larger featured images in posts.
Ali Abdaal’s Ghost Theme was designed with Ghost Expert, Dan Rowden and is suitable for various sites from different niches! The template offers some additional features too. You have the option to show a table of content (TOC) and disable comments on specific posts by using the internal tag #no-comments, use native comments or use the optional commenting tool, Cove. You can even disable the newsletter subscription form in the footer when it’s not needed.
Sections & Layouts
How to add the Primary and Secondary Dropdown Menu in Navigation Bar?
The Ali Abdaal Ghost Theme supports two-level menus with dropdowns under one primary menu item.
To add a Primary/Secondary dropdown menu item, you must build your navigation structure inside the Navigation setting in Ghost Admin. Add two hyphens and a space to the beginning of any navigation item that should be a sub-menu item.
As a recommendation, add as many as seven top-level menu items due to restrictions in space in the header.
The entire menu is easily customizable from Ghost Admin settings in Navigation, and no code changes are required.
What are Content Hub Pages in Ali Abdaal Original?
Ever wanted to group related articles under a main page, just like a mini-site? With the Ali Abdaal Original template, you can do just that with the help of Content Hub Pages.
The Hub page is an optional feature. Content Hub Pages will give you an overview of all the latest content and links and summaries to the individual pages. You can skip the creation of these hub pages altogether and use the existing tags page to display related content.
To create a Content Hub Page, you will have to edit your HTML-based template code, which might seem intimidating as this is a bit involved. The great thing is that all details are available in the theme’s documentation. Plus, it’s just a 7 step process, and once you do it a couple of times, it becomes much more manageable. To see this feature in action, you can check out Ali’s Productivity page at https://aliabdaal.com/productivity/.
Pricing and Conclusion
The Ali Abdaal Ghost template comes at a costlier price tag of $149.
Still, it’s designed and used by one of the top YouTubers in marketing and personal branding so that you can trust its performance. It’s fast, efficient, and offers excellent performance for loading times.
This template is a fantastic choice for content creators looking to build an excellent website with a powerful theme like Ali Abdaal’s. However, it takes much work to customize the template according to your website’s requirements. It requires some coding knowledge to edit the pages per your requirements. But what compensates for that is the excellent documentation that explains every step in detail, making customization easier.
So there you have it: an in-depth look at Ali Abdaal’s powerful Ghost template. So if you’re looking for a powerful and versatile Ghost theme, check out Ali Abdaal’s Ghost theme. You can purchase this template from SuperThemes Co’s Gumroad listing. Thanks for reading!
thememyghost –
Overall, Ali Abdaal Original is a great Ghost theme, but we cannot justify its high price. At $149, other reputed developers provide many themes that offer many more features. No doubt that there are some unique features like Content Hub pages, Dropdown navigation, and Custom Newsletter page, but these were designed explicitly for Ali Abdaal. This theme also is comparatively complex to set up, especially for the Content Hub pages. If everyone starts to use the same design, it will lose its primary objective of being used by a top YouTuber, which can be a reason for its high price.