Last updated on September 4, 2017
Salient is a multi-purpose theme, launched in March 2013 by ThemeNectar, an Envato Power Elite author. This is an elegant theme, with various customization options and a clean code structure. ThemeNectar designed this template as a creative and flexible template, with modern lines and extensive visual effects.
Design
The Salient theme combines strong graphics with stylish design to create a complete and compelling image in the visitor’s mind. This theme is an interactive and flexible template, with beautiful content layouts, animations, and intuitive navigation, that will make each website more vivid. Salient comes with eighteen demos, each with its different look and feeling.
The ThemeNectar developers considered that design and user experience are the core features that website owners are looking for in a theme. Salient is following this tested recipe imposed by the latest trends: full width layouts, strong retina ready images, video backgrounds, and highlighted content. All these dynamic tools are meant to attract visitors and challenge them to engage with the website’s content.
The Salient theme is loaded with features created to help the user style and customize his website to virtually any shape. For the header section, this theme comes with six different layouts, a link hover effect, navigation transparency and various color schemes. The template is crafted to allow you to choose and modify typography for the navigation, the page header, and specific elements, without using custom font types.
With dedicated posts templates and styles, this theme makes the process of building blog and portfolio pages as smooth as possible. You can style blog pages using five different formats and three mansory templates, add animation and sidebars. For portfolio pages, you can use templates based on columns or full width formats, and choose one of the eight available project styles.
The Salient theme comes bundled with a lot of design improvements like full-width and boxed layouts, parallax posts, infinite scroll effect, masonry grids and responsive structures. If you feel like adding a touch of creativity on your website, you can use the ‘Nectar Slider’ or the ‘Home Slider.’ After creating a slider with the Nectar custom tool, you’re able to place it in various locations and customize buttons, pagination, videos or images. Using the ‘Home Slider,’ you’ll get an automatically generated, less customizable slider on top of the homepages. Salient also allows you to create image & video background slides and use them as elements on your posts or pages.
In the footer area, this theme can display the content on one to four columns.
Functionality
The theme comes with the Salient Options Panel, where all the settings are gathered and organized in submenus. The main set of options is the General Settings, which allows you to modify the website’s styling and functionality.
The Visual Composer plugin is based on the WP Bakery product, enhanced with Theme Nectar author modifications.
The page builder has 51 custom elements that are ready to be used to create beautiful pages. Nectar Slider, Portfolio, Milestone (animated feature), fancy boxes, social buttons, animated anchors (called Page submenus), lightbox effect for video, are a few custom elements designed to enhance the visual appealing. Also, the Salient theme comes with Nectar Shortcode system that provides other 20 shortcodes that can be included on the website.
You can create posts and pages with the Salient Visual Composer and the Shortcode Generator. To give even more flexibility, the authors added individual settings for every page, and 12 templates are available for you to use. The latest versions of this theme come with the new Salient Studio tab which can be found in the Salient Visual Composer. It contains over 150 custom section templates which let you mix and match different elements directly into your pages. To style the header section, you can add an image, video or HTML5 Canvas background and customize the theme to suit your project.
Additional options for the header section are available on posts. This template allows you apply a set of display configuration related to the header background image, color, or transparency for each post. Your content may be published using various post templates like standard, quote, video, audio, gallery or link formats. This allows you to create a continuity line between the post content, style, and media resources.
The theme is compatible with community and forum plugins like bbPress and BuddyPress. If you plan to add a shop to your website, you’ll be glad to know that Salient is WooCommerce ready.
This template is built to be used with ease by both beginners and advanced users. Salient comes with a child theme included in the package. SEO optimised, this product is also responsive and retina ready.
| GENERAL | |
|---|---|
| Item name | Salient |
| Category | Multi-purpose |
| Type | Premium |
| Author | ThemeNectar |
| Envato elite author | Yes |
| Tested version | 8.0.2 |
| COMPATIBILITY | |
| Content width | Full width |
| Browser compatibility | IE9+ / Chrome / FF / Opera / Safari / Edge |
| WooCommerce | Yes |
| bbPress | Yes |
| BuddyPress | Yes |
| WPML | Yes |
| FONTS AND TRANSLATION | |
| Integrated translation | - |
| Google fonts | Yes |
| Custom fonts | - |
| Typekit fonts | - |
| RTL support | Yes |
| POST FEATURES | |
| Video posts | Yes |
| Audio posts | Yes |
| Post templates | 1 |
| Post view counter | - |
| Smart lists | - |
| Social share | Yes |
| Custom image lightbox | Yes |
| Custom image galery | Yes |
| Link post | Yes |
| Lightbox skins | 3 |
| PAGE FEATURES | |
| Page templates | 12 |
| Blocks | 51 |
| Widgets | 2 |
| Header styles | 6 |
| Footer styles | 1 |
| Masonry layout | Yes |
| Mega menus | Yes |
| Sticky menu | Yes |
| Social networks | Yes |
| Social counter | - |
| Video playlists | - |
| Instagram widget | - |
| Custom Page Builder | Salient Visual Composer |
| Portfolio styles | 8 |
| Responsive layout | Breakpoints |
| Blog layouts | 5 |
| Menu styles | 2 |
| Dual Sidebars | - |
| Shortcodes | Yes |
| Video slider | Yes |
| OTHER FEATURES | |
| Demos included | 18 |
| SEO optimized | Yes |
| Custom Theme Updater | - |
| ADS | |
| Ad system | Yes |
| Adsense support | Yes |
| Custom ads | Yes |
| PERFORMANCE | |
| CSS file size | 514 KB |
| Overall speed | Medium |
| Performance documentation | - |
| USER EXPERIENCE | |
| Total ratings | 4698 |
| User rating | |
| Learnability | Medium |
| DESIGN | |
| Responsive design | Yes |
| Retina ready | Yes |
| DOCUMENTATION | |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Explanations | Detailed |
| Explicit screen shots | Yes |
| Video tutorials | Yes |
| Search option | Yes |
| Extra documentation | - |
| PREMIUM PLUGINS | |
| Plugins | Salient Visual Composer |
| VALUE | |
| Price | $60 |
| Value for the money | Good |
Performance
We have tested the Salient’s default demo on different page speed tests, and the results reveal that the demo has a medium page loading speed.
Downsides
The theme’s documentation comes with video tutorials, but they look outdated since the last ones were created about a year ago.
With Salient it’s quite difficult to add a custom font or a Typekit one. To do this, you need to install a typography plugin, or you should have some development skills, as it’s a must to change it via CSS.
