Which Theme does Labnol (Digital Inspiration) Use?

Amit Agarwal is a celebrity tech blogger from India. Although it is a vague claim but he is considered to be the first professional blogger in India. But there no doubt that Amit Agarwal inspired lot of people who wanted to make money online from publishing web content and truly, after his success, a number of other Indian bloggers also made a mark in the field of blogging. Amit’s primary blog is called Digital Inspiration (on the domain name labnol.org). This blog stands out among other top tech blogs for it’s design and a number of people have asked me about which WordPress theme Labnol is using. To answer many questions about theme of Digital Inspiration, I decided to write this article.

Well, the theme’s name is Elemin and it is developed by Themify. If you’re looking to download Labnol theme, you can not! Don’t waste you time because Elemin is a premium theme and is NOT available for free. You’ll have to shell out $49 (price in September 2014) to get a license to use it. If any website or person offers you a copy of paid themes, I would suggest you don’t take it. First of all, it is illegal to use a paid theme without purchasing the required license and secondly the free-to-download-versions of such themes might be tempered with.

Elemin on Labnol has been customized by Amit for his specific needs. This elegant theme allows you to create child themes and Labnol’s theme is actually a child theme based on Elemin. More features of Elemin are as below:

• Responsiveness (works like a charm on all kinds of devices)
• Variety of post formats
• Easy to add header RSS, search form, and social network icons
• Header and footer custom menu
• Text in footer
• List view and multiple grid view layouts
• Up to 4 footer widget columns
• Threaded comments
• Coded with HTML5 & CSS3
• Can be used to create child themes

Only Amit knows the real answer to this question! But a safe guess can be that he wanted his blog to have a rather unique identity. Most of the top bloggers use WordPress frameworks like Genesis and Thesis and tailor them to their requirements. A number of free WordPress themes from Themify are very popular but not many of their paid themes have found their way among top bloggers’ community. So, using a paid theme from Themify ensured relatively unique aesthetics for Labnol.

A good and carefully selected framework can give your website a boost but eventually all that actually matters is the quality of your content. There is no doubt that Amit’s Digital Inspiration is full of great content –so he does not really need to bother about which framework he is using. This perhaps is the reason that prompted him to break away from rather widely used Genesis/Thesis designs.

A screenshot of Labnol.org taken on 22 November 2013

This theme is indeed very impressive. It’s highly responsive and looks crafted by master designers. I have taken a few ideas from Elemin to design TechWelkin theme. Reading content on Elemin gives a feeling as though you’re reading a book –serif fonts and left-side note-margin makes it look quite close to a book’s page.

Amit has added a good feature of “Couch Mode” to his customized theme. When this mode is activated by a visitor, the reading area spreads out as sidebars disappear –making it easier to read longer articles.

Amit’s use of Elemin for Labnol is a good advertisement for Themify. Digital Inspiration receives about 3 to 4 million page views every month. I am sure most of the visiting bloggers leave Labnol website wondering about the theme and a way to implement the same theme on their own blogs. Themify must be getting a significant number of Elemin sales, courtesy Labnol.