Elegant Real Estate Premium Wordpress Theme Review
Most Real Estate websites I’ve seen are either not working correctly, not showing relevant information or look awful. It’s hard to make all these features work and most of the time very expensive. Elegant Real Estate Wordpress theme solves all these problems and does much more. The design is just perfect in terms of how a real estate website should look, visual hierarchy is wonderful and all the animated elements from the slideshow to the menu, widgets in the footer are just great. Nothing too fancy, just the right amount of perfect.
Design And Functionality
Home Page and Slideshow
The nicest part of the home page is the slideshow(check it out in the image above). It’s just a wonderful implementation of jQuery functionality and design that’s automatic (so you don’t get bored) and flexible so it let’s you choose what to see, a perfect combination with the content on the left side and a auto-resized big version of the post picture at the right side that has a transparent overlay of small thumbs (again, automatically resized).
You can configure in the admin panel page what posts and how many go in the slideshow from witch category overall making the slideshow a very useful well designed and cool idea. The little thumbs jump up just a little when you hover over them, kind of like icons on a OSX dock and they go to a post once clicked.
The menu
Another unique part of the theme that’s also very useful for this particular type of theme is the Search Listing sidebar widget that’s hard coded into the flexible widgets sidebar that’s under it.
Menus don’t need to be complex and hard to figure out visually. The easier and cleaner they are, the faster they help you make the job of clicking and going to the page you want. This menu is special. It is simple and cool at the same time with a really nice coded sliding effect on hover and subcategories that show nicely from each link from the menu that requires them.
The Sidebar
Pretty in red, the sidebar has a hard coded part named Search Listings. Here you can search for homes for sale, apartments for rent, new homes or Foreclosure having the ability to add extra details in your search to narrow it down, things like price range, number bedrooms and number of bathrooms.
This part is just a static working form that you don’t get to change in the admin, because, you must admit, it’s pretty useful. But what you do get to change is what comes under it. This is the part for the dynamic widgets that you get to pick in the admin under the widgets panel.
(Click Image to Expand)
The Content
Sitting on what looks as a transparent layer over the background, the content is very well organized and aligned, each element was very well taken care of from title to content and all the wordpress elements like author, number of comments, date posted just blend in the content with perfectly matching colors and sizes, making the design look even better than it already does.
Another thing that you can’t miss is the custom styled post information for house/apartment etc like the price and number of bedrooms and bathrooms. But this is not where we stop on the content as it can do much more. The visual hierarchy is just extremely well made, in fact that’s “yet another thing” that makes this theme design so awesome.
And it’s not just that it supports and handles like a professional all the wordpress css and html elements but also has a few elements like a sort of lightbox feature for a gallery of the pictures inside a post. Also another great thing is comments:
Well documented with xHTML support on tags that users can manage in their content and a even better feature that just puts the cherry at the top:
Yep! it supports threaded comments and that’s how 5 level deep replies look.
Almost forgot my favorite feature for any theme, full width pages.
So maybe you need to embed a full HD video , large pictures or just want your content to fill up all the space, the theme allows you to do this from the admin panel
The footer
You don’t even notice it’s beauty until you scroll down and see it blending into the end of the page making a very nice “exit” for the content.
It has a really cool implemented live twitter news from your account, that slide at a certain period of time or when the little cool arrows are clicked and custom made widgets with comments, links and a custom category post results. Finishing the relevant information with site copyright plus extra menu links and at the very bottom, a very elegant logo version of what is supposed to be the bottom of the page. Nice, really well made… Simple, very good looking and effective. A++ from my point of view.
The Admin Panel
Each respectable theme must have a admin panel page(because people want to change things) and Elegant Real Estate theme is doing it’s job well here too.
It actually has a little menu named Theme Editor at the bottom of the admin panel in the left side of wp-admin with four pages that do almost all of the work.
Starting with General Options, this page is what it says it is, containing all the elements needed to manage stuff like color scheme select where you can change the way the theme looks(even backgrounds and colors) letting you add a new look/feel to the theme. You get to choose from Default style, Ivory Dove( a white background version), Black and white and Blue Max.(see picture examples here)
You get to choose witch your homepage is going to be, what currency symbol to use, what category should there be in the blog section , what categories to exclude from the dropdown list.. etc All very useful and important. On this page you can also add your twitter account and tracking stats for analytics or anything else that you might need plus you have the option of showing or not the cool search Listings widget that is a enabled checkbox by default.
If you don’t have a Search Engine Optimization plugin to manage your SEO settings, there’s a page in this theme for that where you can enable it (it is by default) and configure description and keywords.
If you want a more custom logo, there’s a dedicated page just for the logo where you can change the logo and it’s dimensions, not only for the header one but for the footer one too.
One of the most important pages in the admin panel is the Featured Slider Setup as this is the page that manages the most important visual element in your front page , the slider. So you have a ton of options here that you get to configure, from what category the slider posts get to be in, how many should they show and what type of animation should there be for the transition, to animation speed for both description and images slider (That’s a nice dynamic feature).
But wait, there’s more!
You may ask yourself: how do I make the theme know what kind of houses I am looking for at what price and all the other information? I mean, when you search with the Listings widget, how does it know?
It knows because you get to input custom fields in a special little widget found at the bottom of the content of each post. Easy and great!
So now all the information for each new home for sale or apartment for rent is stored in the database and queries are generated fast and effective for any search that you generate using the Listings widget.
What have we learned?
That if we ever need a good real estate website we don’t have to waste a lot of money and time on it because “there’s a theme for that” and it’s called Elegant Real Estate. For more information about the theme on how to install it, how to use it and a full list of features and plugin support, be sure to check out the read me.
There are a lot of PSD files included in the download so you get to have the design too and if you want to change stuff in it you can do this with ease.
For support contact the developer.
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