For the last couple weeks we’ve searched for a great WordPress Parallax Theme. We looked at dozens of parallax themes with mixed results. Last time, we looked “Persona” Parallax Theme—a major disappointment. This time we are taking a closer look at a great parallax theme: Mercurial Parallax Theme.

Mercurial Parallax Theme stood out from the crowd because of its great front-end design which is paired with an impressive integration with WordPress on the back-end. Mercurial also comes loaded with some great features. We were really impressed by the shortcodes and other single click insertion features.

Short-codes:

• Sliders: this theme comes ready to roll with 5 short-codes with different versions of the slider which give the theme a level of adaptability that is very uncommon. 
• Short-codes: portfolio, buttons, alters, jquery “skils” bars, columns, toggle boxes, tabs, and more
• Bonus Short-codes: social media buttons, twitter feed widget, multiple versions of the slider

Theme Integration with WordPress

• Custom post types
• Fully Integrated Front Page Sections (no arbitrary limits on sections or number of pages or types of post)
• Built in post-types for specific front page sections
• A fully working/integrated WordPress menus, including second level drop downs. (This is a great detail for a mostly one page site design)
• Single Pages (not home page integrated) are possible with theme (perfect for landing pages or other pages you don’t want to feature  on the home page, this is a great thing to have with a single page layout parallax style theme).
• A minimal but great looking blog design.

The UX is OK…Better Than Most

We love that this WordPress parallax theme is fully and properly integrated with WordPress. So many themes are hack jobs made by developers who are porting themes to and from other CMS platforms. Poorly integrated themes don’t use WordPress best practices for integrating themes with the full power of the WordPress dashboard. UX is also about details. One detail we appreciate is the placement of the theme options under the standard “Appearance” tab in the WordPress dashboard. Another similar detail is the short code generator in the page/post editor. This theme neatly tucks all the available short codes under a singel unobtrusive button. The short-codes are clearly labeled: no guess work required. But this theme takes things further with a fully integrated short-code generator. Once the desired short-code is determined the short-code generator guides the user through making the complete ready to embed code. This is an incredible improvement over simply dumping short-codes into the post editor. The short-codes produced are complete and ready to publish. AMAZING.