Paragon | creative, upscale, boundless WP theme

CURRENT VERSION: 1.3.4

PARAGON IS WP 3.5.1 COMPATIBLE!

You may have seen the overwhelming amount of WordPress themes that look mostly the same in a way that you can not even distinguish one from the other! The very idea behind Paragon is to step forward from what WordPress does to what WordPress can do. We believe WordPress can serve beyond the stringent borders developers and community have drawn arround it.

Paragon is the best example of a WordPress theme that gets the most out of WordPress technology to go beyond these borders. We have overworked on both back-end and front-end of our product to provide the authors with a unique experience. Here’s why this theme is way ahead of its time!

1-PARAGON PLAYS ULTRA-RESPONSIVE

When we say Paragon is ultra-responsive we dont just mean in popular screen sizes such as iPhone or iPad. To be more technical, Paragon will fit into any screen size less than 1140px wide. It means we dont define widths with fixed pixel values, rather layouts are flexible with percents. therefore you wont see any issue with unpopular device sizes as well.

we did not ignore any element in responsive design. All shortcodes, Blog and Portfolio loops, slideshows are carefully coded to make sure they do not break in any circumstances. Just try our responsive Main Navigation. its unique animations without doubt creates a sense that this theme is developed for a smartphone.

While on your smartphone or tablet, you can swipe carelessley! You don’t have to move on straight axis to explore across the screen. Just a quick touch of finger and done. Paragon acts as it’s an app not a webpage!

2- FUTURISTIC BLOG/PORTFOLIO STYLES, 3D LAYOUT AND SMOOTH SCROLL AND MORE

Paragon includes 3 different styles for your blog loops and 3 for your portfolio presentations. You can use Classic and Grid styles for your offical business website and use Newspaper style to cover your constant flow of information and news. But if you’re heading to grab one of those awards for your awesome website this season, take our advice and try Metro: the most modern blog/portfolio style for creatives.

In short, 3D background is a modern practice that defines the movement of different backgrounds on different speeds. This trick generates an illusion of distance between two layers in human eye. and that’s where the 3D layout emerges!

In Paragon this feature is implemented on page, Slideshow section and body backgrounds, so you can easily manipulate backgrounds movement speed according to page scroll. This feature is optional and you can disable it from admin panel.

But that’s not all:

smooth-scroll is also another aesthetic practice to provide a delicate and fantastic experience for your audience. You won’t see the magic unless you give it a try!

We’re also glad to say:

All these UI features are Retina-ready. Thanks to modern technology of font icons your icons will appear clean and attractive on Retina displays.

And YES! IT’S TRUE that you can create unlimited variations of icons using:

Taking advantage of modern CSS, Paragon icons act just like refular fonts. You can define any size and any color for your icons without worrying about the quality. Icons are based on 16×16 grid which enables you play with your icons unlimitedly and without worrying about losing quality.

3-FULLY FLEDGED BACK-END

ROBUST ADMIN PANEL

Paragon is powered by Masterkey Settings. Its not just another WordPress admin panel. Masterkey has been designed and developed in Artbees. Its User interface, UI elements, Icons and all are designed from scratch to provide you with a solid and flawless administration experience across all our current and future themes.

It’s simple, powerful and well-organized; all of which is the result of a profound R&D in the market and WP community. No matter you are new to wordpress, an expert blogger or a profesional web designer, you won’t be lost within a labyrinth of settings and options. everything is arranged and placed according to your need, priority and usage frequency. Here is a quick set of features you’ll find in our admin panel. To see it in action, check out the following video:

DRAG & DROP PAGE COMPOSER

We have used the best plugin in the market (Visual Composer for WordPress) to build up our Page compuser. Its drag and drop module is easy and functional. It also comes with predefined layouts and templates. Bear in mind that we have made huge editing and improvements to the plugin both in UI and codes to provide the best possible experience for the end-user.

Curious how we’ve improved page composer plugin for the best output and ease of use? Check out this video:

VISUAL BACKGROUND SELECTOR

Many sections on a website can be assigned a background. Paragon enables you to define different backgrounds for Body, Header, Page and footer sections of your site. You can define color, background image, background repeat, background attachment and background position.

You can choose one of predefined background images (including classic patterns or those for 3D layout) or upload your own texture or pattern.

If you place these options in a list there will be a long list of 26 options which would be very confusing and difficult for most of us to manage. And that’s why we’ve effortfully worked on various aspects of a good background selector and finally come up with one of the most beautiful solution one can find across the market.

Thanks to its user-friendly UI, now you just manage all of those settings with a few clicks and only on a visual basis.

Good news is that you can immediately preview any changes you make in the right pane. We worked hard to make this feature simple, quick and working. One last word! Using the background selector to create demos for our theme was so much exciting and delicate. Don’t forget to check it out in action (click here to see video).

ADVANCED TYPOGRAPHY

Text in Paragon is legible, diverse and versatile. Paragon takes advantage of advanced typography features. Thanks to its enormous repository of over 600 fonts, you’re not obliged to use a single font throughout your website anymore.

You can change the font size, font-weight and font-color of most of the element. You can assign a particular font-family to a group of different elements. Moreover you can modify most of the shortcodes to have different typography characteristics.

RGBa COLOR PICKERS

RGBa is a great feature of modern CSS that lets you define alpha transparency for a color. If you’re one of those creatives who intend to join the creative experiements of new web design, you can count highly on this feature as it gives your design a bland and modern look as well as more depth and dimension. The new web is already using various opacities for texts as part of a great typography trend.

For your next project, you can define a color with preferred opacity in front-end and we will convert the HEX values to RGBa and consequently add alpha opacity to it. It does not affect the site performance cause we cache all dynamic skin values into a CSS file once you save the options. We also handle backward compatibility for those old browsers (such as IE7 & IE8) that does not support RGBa.

4- WOO-COMMERCE INTEGRATION

5- TRANSLATION READY & WPML COMPATIBLE

All of the textual content in the theme (backend & frontend) are localised and placed in .PO files. Therefore you can easily translate the theme to any language. Paragon is fully compatible with WPML plugin which enables you to use this theme for multilingual purposes.

6- SEO, SPEED AND PERFORMANCE

Paragon is developed based on the modern HTML and SEO standards:

• We used HTML5 tags for better semantics which makes it easier for search engine robots to crawl through your site.


• Main content is placed before sidebar.


• Heading tags are used according to their priority within the context.


• “alt” properties for image tags have been used for better SEO results.

Generally WP themes with loads of options have performance downwards; Paragon is also a rich theme that constitutes many dynamic processes:

• To reduce dynamic database calls to the minimum amount, Paragon controls cached skinning processes.


• All options related to coloring, typography, backgrounds and so forth are saved in a CSS file which is updated everytime you save any option in backend. This action reduces around 60 database queries form the other side and ultimately increase the site performance and speed. There is other improvements in this regard, but we avoid them here for their very technical essence.

7- DEDICATED SUPPORT AND VALUABLE UPDATS

We developed this theme to help you employ the latest tools and standards into your website. but that’s not all!

Accompanying you during the way towards the best usage of this theme is also part of our product. As with our other products across Envato marketplaces, there is dedicated support staff who monitor our helpdesk everyday and respond to your problems and difficulties in short time; all of which is 100% free and taken very seriously.

KEY FEATURES

• Wordpress 3.4 Compatible


• Responsive for any screen size


• Valid HTML5 and CSS3, Cross browser compatible


• SEO optimized


• Woo-commerce Integration


• Translation Ready


• Incredibly powerful admin panel


• Phenomenal Skin Manager, yet incredibly easy


• Visual Theme Bakcground Manager


• Predefined 30 Backgrounds Patterns and textures (picked form hundreds)


• 3D Layout Backgrounds (Enables background images to move faster or slower than page scroll, which creates other dimension)


• Unlimited colors


• Lifetime Shortcodes, Over 60 shortcodes


• Includes Layer Slider


• Includes Revolution Slider


• Includes Flexslider


• Drag and Drop Page Composer


• Custom post types (Portfolios, Employees, Pricing Tables, Clients, Testimonials, Flexslider)


• Unlimited homepage layouts.


• Unlimited Sidebars


• 14 Footer Column styles


• Smooth Page Scroll


• 3 portfolio Styles with Image, Video and Audio post types


• 3 Blog layouts with Image, Video and Audio, Document, Portfolio post types


• Very powerful typography options with 500+ Google fonts, 40+ Fontface, all safefonts


• Custom CSS, custom JS, Google Analytics and Google Map Integration


• Import Export Options


• Pricing Tables


• AJAX enabled contact form as widget and shortcode


• WPML Compatible


• 18 Custom widgets.


• Built-in Image reseize compatible with Retina Images


• Reliable Support & Documentation


• Demo Content Added

UPDATE LOG

UPDATE 1.3.4 / 29.04.2013

+ Layerslider updated to latest version (4.5.5)
+ Option to disable comments from Blog newspaper style
+ Option to change the number of comments from blog loop newspaper style
+ Option to change introduce title simple style color
+ Woocommerce widget area for shop loops
+ Blog and portfolio loops load time enhanced
+ Similar posts in single blog posts are fixed.
+ Child theme issue fixed.
+ Footer Slogan small issue on disable case.
+ Background Image and 3D background options for Full width box shortcode added.
+ Lightbox for slideshow shortcode added.
+ Minor bug fixes

UPDATE 1.3.3 / 31.03.2013

+ Fixed. Logo issue on mobile devices
+ Added. Logo top and bottom padding for vertical aligning.

UPDATE 1.3.2 /29.03.2013

+ Added. Alt tag option for image shortcode
+ Fixed. Page composer editor some tags such as br was stripping out
+ Fixed. Mobile devices switch orientation bug fixed.
+ Fixed. Search form dynamic color
+ Minor CSS improvements 

UPDATE 1.3.1 / 23.03.2013

+ Fixed. Disable video lightbox option in portfolio loops
+ Added. Main navigation top level hover text color
+ Minor bug fixes

UPDATE 1.3 / 18.03.2013

+ Layerslider updated to v 4.1.1
+ Added option to disable fixed header
+ Added layout option to change layout in each blog post
+ Added custom social network icons for social network widget
+ minor css issues

UPDATE 1.2.2 / 15.03.2013

+ minor bug fixes

UPDATE 1.2.1 / 12.03.2013

+ Woocommerce Pages responsive issues fixed
+ minor css issues

UPDATE 1.2 / 09.03.2013

+ Woocommerce 2.02 Compatible
+ Gallery Shortcode added
+ Retina Ready
+ Icons converted to font icons for unlimited color and size capabilities (they are also retina ready)
+ Option added to change main container width.
+ minor reported bug fixes

UPDATE 1.1 / 04.03.2013

+ Woocommerce Integration
+ Social Networks icons converted to font icon (150 icons)
+ Header Fixed animation improved.
+ Single Post Metaboxes issues fixed
+ Contact forms validation issue fixed
+ option to disable header search form.
+ Fancy text shortcode font weight option added
+ Footer column issue fixed.
+ more than 20 minor bug fixes in css scope.

Credits (Plugins)

• jQuery by John Resig


• WP-PageNavi Plugin by Lester GaMerZ Chan


• jQuery Easing plugin by George McGinley Smith


• ColorBox by Jack Moore


• jCarousel by Bill Scott


• jQuery Tools


• Jquery Tweet by Todd Matthews & Steve Purcell


• Color picker by Stefan Petre


• jQuery Range Input


• jPlayer by Mark J Panaghiston


• Isotop by David DeSandro / Metafizzy


• Flexslider by Tyler Smith


• Dancing girl in slider by Marcus J.Ranum

Credits (images)

• Simon Gustavsson


• David Lanham


• Caroline Blanchet . Digital Artist . www.ptitecao.com


• Anthony Scime


• Marcus J.Ranum

tags: clean, corporate, creative, google fonts, html5, localized, modern, multi color, portfolio, responsive, seo, 3d parallax effect, page composer, unlimited colors