Zerif Pro Theme Review [Update 2022: now Zelle Pro]
The Zerif Pro theme (recently rebranded to Zelle Pro theme) is available in a lite version and a pro (paid) paid version. The theme has been growing in popularity over the recent past and has made a name for itself. With several awesome features and customization options, it continues to gain traction. The theme offers you the opportunity to build stunning one-page websites. In this article we will have a detailed look at the Zerif Pro theme.
Features
Zerif is a one-page theme and so all your content will be on your homepage. The theme has the usual menu at the top with the logo on the left.
- Slider – The theme comes with a built-in homepage slider. As this is the first area your visitors will see when they land on your website, your message here should be clear cut. Your visitors should immediately be able to establish what they will be able to do with their time on your website. You can display custom messages on the slider, and you can also add some buttons to the slider. It’s a great feature to have. Make sure you use it to effectively capture users’ attentions.
- Portfolio – A portfolio is used to showcase your previous work and helps build trust with your visitors. With the Zerif theme’s portfolio section you can display up to 8 items. There are awesome hover effects for each portfolio item and clicking on any will lead to the portfolio item’s page.
- About Us– In this section you can have your company details, what you do and what you have to offer. You can also use this section to showcase logos of your clients or brands that you work with.
- Team Members – This section can be used to easily display your team members. Each member’s photo can be displayed along with their designation, description of what they do and links to their social media profiles. The description of the members is only displayed when hovering over an individual member. This makes the page look less cluttered.
- Pricing tables – The theme also has a built-in pricing plan section. You can use this section to display up to 4 pricing plans for your visitors. The pricing tables are responsive and cleverly crafted to capture a user’s attention.
- Just after the pricing section is the testimonial section. Here you can display client testimonials. This section can include the client’s name and their testimonial. The layout is excellently designed, and this section is vital to building trust with new customers.
- Google Maps – The theme is integrated with Google Maps and can easily display any map from google in this section. You can use it to give directions to your office or store location. Having Google Maps built-in allows you to avoid bloating your website with plugins for Google Maps.
- Blog – At the very bottom of the page you will find the blog section. This will display your latest posts in a slider and clicking on any of the posts will open the post. If you plan to run a blog this is an excellent section to have on your homepage. You can use it to help your visitors keep up with the latest happening on your website.
- Contact section – there are several ways in which your clients will probably be able to contact you. However, having a built-in contact form is an excellent way of providing a quick and efficient way for your clients to communicate to you without leaving your website. There is also google reCaptcha compatibility for the form, meaning you can easily avoid spam using this.
Customizing the theme
In your WordPress dashboard navigate to Appearance and then click on customize. You will get a similar screen that has several customization options.
The customization options are divided into various sections.
- Site Identity – here you can change the title of your website and the tagline as well. You can also define a custom favicon your website here.
- General Options – Here you will find settings related to the logo of your website, you can also setup custom footer copyright text and you can also add custom JavaScript tracking codes such as Google Analytics codes.
- Very top bar – this is a new feature of the Zerif pro theme. Here you can add a menu or text to the top bar on your website.
- Background – From here you can easily configure a background for each section of your website. Simply select the type of background you want to use i.e image or video and then select the section in which you want to use it.
- Front page sections – Here you will find specific settings for each of the sections on the home page. You can also enable or disable sections from here. You can also display any section more than once.
- Order the front-page sections – From here you can re-arrange the sections of your website. We have talked about several sections earlier in this article.
- Blog options – Controls the layout and configurations of the blog on the homepage.
- Colors – Allows you to control several pre-defined colors of the website including menu colors, text colors, background colors, button colors etc.
Other Features
The theme comes with several other power packed features such as the parallax effect, unlimited color options, full testimonial support and the theme customizer.
Parallax effects when used properly can add life to your website. With the Zerif pro theme, you can control the parallax effects including the image, text, buttons and the parallax speed. The parallax effect is already optimized out of the box and does not slow down your website.
From the customizer you have options to choose unlimited colors for almost any section of your website. You can define text colors, heading colors, link colors, button colors, hover colors, etc. You have unlimited color options and using these you can easily make sure your websites colors are consistent with your branding strategy.
Speed
The speed of a website is now a critical factor to consider for website owners. One of the things that has a major effect on the speed of a website is the theme. We tested the demo of the Zerif pro theme using the GTMetrix tool. Here are the results.
The demo website loaded in almost 8 seconds. That is on the slower side of things and the theme’s developers might need to put in more work here. The 2 culprits for the slow speed were not leveraging browser caching and not deferring parsing of JavaScript. Both of which are easy to take care of. However, it would have been better to have some of these tweaks taken care of out of the box.
Zerif Pro Theme Review – Conclusion
Zerif Pro (recently renamed to Zelle Pro) is a theme that is packed with features. It allows you to quickly put together stunning one-page websites. Have you used the Zerif pro theme? Let us know your thoughts on it, in the comments section below.
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I’ve been developing my site with Zelle Pro for the past several months and I really like its flexibility and functionality; however, the company (Themeisle) that developed the theme is being willfully dishonest in stating that the source code is clean.
After having run a code-validation check that yielded MANY warnings and errors, I contacted customer support and asked them to address the misinformation on their website. The representative, Vytis, first tried to dismiss the “warnings” as harmless javascript warnings, but after he realized that I know how to write code — I specifically identified not just warnings but also downright ERRORS — finally he recognized that my complaints were valid and stopped trying to minimize the problem.
Vytis and I exchanged several extensive e-mails. He was attentive and seemed to care about my poor experience, as he rightfully called it. (Note: I chose to pay a freelancer to fix the source code of my copy.) I repeatedly said that I wanted to see Themeisle either fix the Zelle Pro source code so that it would be validated OR remove the false statement regarding the theme having clean code. I stated that I would be willing to wait up to 2 months for either action to be taken and asked Vytis “not to forget” (to which I received no response).
That 2 months has passed: an update has not been released AND Themeisle has not removed the misinformation from their website. In my correspondence with Vytis, I issued a friendly “warning” that if Themeisle did not do right by potential buyers (the belief that Zelle Pro had clean source code was a deciding factor in my decision to buy a license), regrettably I would be forced to reveal this willful dishonesty on the appropriate forums.
That is my reason for writing today. I wish Themeisle no harm at all, but I do feel that they owe me, and all potential buyers who care, a warning-and-error-free theme as they themselves advertise — or they must remove that deliberately misleading claim. (In fairness, I want it known that as far as I can see, Zelle Pro works well enough even with the multitude of code errors.)
My version is 2.1.5. As of October 2020, the current version (2.1.6) contains the same errors, as Vytis himself warned me over 2 months ago so that I would not download it and overwrite my corrected version.
It took a single freelancer 2 days to clean up the code, so it makes no sense to me that Themeisle has not invested such time to do the same. Disappointingly, I can only attribute this to indifference and not caring that they are promoting the theme with the help of an outright lie.
Once again — now publicly — I ask Themeisle to do the right thing. Notwithstanding the issues mentioned here, your theme is really great; however, if you don’t take prompt action to correct these EASILY CORRECTABLE problems, your integrity as a company will be questionable.
Thank you.
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A wonderful review. you have shared great information.