WordPress Sauron Theme Full Review

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WordPress Sauron Theme is the newly released free WordPress theme. It is a one-page parallax scroll theme that appears to be simple, yet professional. Sauron is mostly designed for business, portfolio, firm and agency websites. It comes with a one page landing page, smooth parallax scrolling and adjusts nicely on different screen sizes.

The theme includes unique blog, portfolio, review and gallery layout options, scrolling effects, sticky menu, post grids, diagram pages, contact forms, lightbox and more.

Sauron is compatible with WordPress 4.0+. The theme is clean and carefully coded, brings high speed performance and is SEO optimized. Regular updates are available for both free and Pro versions. It comes with a one-click sample data installation allowing to build your website in an instant. It gives you the ability to personalize every aspect of your website and has strong focus on typography and usability.

It is quite a fact that full-with background images with parallax scrolling and one page landing templates are trending in the entire web and mobile industry now. Major companies, agencies or news outlets use parallax scroll effects for their websites and it looks plain beautiful. The theme includes some awesome portfolio type layout solutions too. The wide range of available options will allow Sauron users to show each item in its own style and position. Having this in mind it is fair to mention hover effect styles, so between the multiple mouse overs you can view animation effects of post types.

Besides that, rather minor, but important features of the theme includes header search with a live preview. But let me split theme options one by one, so that you’d have more clear vision about this guy.

SEO Friendly Theme

Likewise most of WordPress themes from Web-Dorado, Sauron includes some SEO solutions in the Professional version of the theme. There are 3 main options allowing to set custom page title, meta description of the page and keywords. They can be applied to home page, single posts and pages.

Advanced Layout Editor

The second tab in the theme options is called “Layout Editor”. This option includes 6 layout solutions for your website. With the little preview icons you are able to choose how you want your homepage to appear. The advance fact of layout editor is that you are able to set the content to appear in boxed or full-width layout to match your requirements.

General Options

General options of Sauron Theme include couple of major points you’d like to be familiar with. It starts with “Fixed Menu” check-box, allowing users to choose whether they want their header menu of the website to stick to the top of the window when scrolling down or not. The second option will allow users to inject a custom CSS that will override default styles of any activated plugin and theme. This is quite handy option that to my surprise is not available in major WordPress themes, but with Sauron you have it in both Free and Pro versions. The good thing about custom CSS box is that you will not need to bother to change custom styles of any plugin after you perform an update. This option will save all the changes even after updating the theme.

By default both in Free and Professional version Sauron includes a logo at the top left header menu. It can be customized in general options of the theme under the “logo type” line. 3 available check-boxes allow you to hide the logo , if you don’t want to display anything, add a custom image with an option of upload button or have text title instead of the logo.

Another common question that comes around is connected with the information in the footer area. In General options of the theme you can modify or hide custom small content in the footer area using the available box for HTML code. Have in mind the fact that this solution is 100% legal as in WordPress directory you have products released under GPL, so thus, you can change any referral to authors. Yet, it’s generally considered good form not to claim authorship if you did not create the theme yourself, but add additional information of your theme or website.

Homepage

The homepage is a one page template containing multiple sections with different styles. These posts can be modified from theme options. Besides the framed image posts on home page, there are couple of more post types. Among them are “Blog Posts” – round circle logos with titles with a static background; “Gallery Posts” – allowing to showcase galleries with their default images; “Review posts” – enables users to create a list of excerpts with images styled like testimonials and more.

Besides that users are able to pin one post to homepage and add a custom full-width background with parallax effect to highlight that post on frontpage.

I myself adore the Tumblr and Pinterest like photoset grid layout designs and Sauron seems to be inspired from this eye-catchy, modern and very much modish style. The grid layout is called “Portfolio Posts” under Homepage tab in theme options allowing to select the number of image grids on front end. have in mind the fact that these images are featured images (or content images) of your posts. So if your page or post does not include a featured image, you’d see dizzy “no image” logo. But don’t get disappointed, as available sample data can help you in this case. You may want to install the sample data and then edit the posts and pages one by one, as your site content gets filled with more information.

Let’s go back to the option allowing users to set the number of posts in homepage post grid. You may also filter which post categories to bring in those grid images up front.

At the end of the home page users can put links to their website profiles over major social networks. Sauron includes redirection feature for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and LinkedIn.

And the last feature that can be added on home page is the “Contact Us” box. You can add your contact name, chose an image for “Contact Us” background and add description.

Fonts And Typography Settings

A lot bloggers tend to change the style of typography on their landing pages, whether it is the heading, inputs or even primary text. Even though I would personally recommend to stick with basic reading fonts if you are doubting about changing the main fonts of your website, Sauron comes with a wide range of typography customization solutions for those who want to make major changes in fonts too. So as I mentioned, you’d be able to change both main text areas as well as secondary ones. Theme options include more than 30 font styles, allow to preview the change in the back end or edit the font styles with some additional tools, including solutions for spacing, text transformation, weight, style and more.

Lightbox

Sauron includes a full width lightbox for post images. it can include headline info in the lightbox with positioning options, autoplayer, include transition effect (theme comes with 15 effects) and have intervals and custom height and width.

Integrated Advertising And Widgets

The widgets, that are available in the free version of the theme, allow to add custom widgets in 5 widget areas located in sidebars and footer. This is quite wide scope of widgets that can function on a website and catch the eye of surfers. Normally free WordPress themes will have one or two widget areas for advertising and AdSense for example, yet the Sauron comes with some more additional widget solutions. So besides the mentioned areas for widgets, you will be able to add category widgets. These are elegant flipping boxes you can create and redirect to certain tabs, profiles or links. Perfect solution for personal pages and portfolios as well. One of the widgets is quite unique. It is called Sauron Percent. It is a module allowing to present certain statistics in a circular or bar-shaped animated modules.

Speaking on modules and widgets, it is fair to mention that you can demonstrate your posts as a gallery with some cool animation effects.

Integration settings that are available in Professional version only, allow users to add custom javascript code for affiliates, tracking, advertising and other purposes. This can be added into pagetag, content or footer.

Color Control

The name of the theme is obviously inspired by the main antagonist of J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic novel The Lord of the Rings. This is probably the reason of all fantasy environment chromed settings colors that come by default.

Color of dark mountains, metal, gray-blue shades and monochrome silver palette dominate all over the theme. But the good news is that despite the default colors, the theme includes 3 more color schemes that can be changed by one click, namely “Moonstone Blue”, “Cherry Blossom Pink” and “Olive Green”. In the Color Control tab of theme settings you will be able not only select another color scheme, but edit every bit of color appearing on front end.

Sample Data

The Professional version of Sauron includes sample data, allowing users to have the same layout design as on WordPress Sauron Theme Demo page. Take a note, that after first installation you obviously will not experience all the features and visuals of the theme on your website if there are no posts or pages created. So this is why the sample data makes it easy to install it first and then edit the posts and pages one by one to match your requirements. The options also allow the complete one-click removal of sample data.

With Sauron WordPress Theme you are free to express your creativity and experience multiple ways to create modern and creative websites. The variety of options both in Free and Professional version of the theme bring high performance experience, making it a smooth-running theme that can behave as a multiple solution source.

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