WP Theme Feedback

Greetings Themeforest Community,

We just submitted our first WP theme, Simpl, and it was rejected for actually very few issues. The tech issues have been corrected and the only aspect left to “polish” is the overall design according to the reviewer. The feedback even states that a resubmit with the design as it currently is, just “refined” could potentially get it accepted. The purpose of this theme is the simplicity and the “uniqueness” the reviewer spoke of comes in the form of the functionality that we have in place on the home page. I am not sure if the review staff actually installs the themes or if they just do a visual inspection the first go around but, I certainly believe that the functionality is there.

I do agree that there are a few minor spacing and padding issues in the design, we are fixing them…they are likely the same ones that were driving me nuts while we were developing it. Fix it in one browser, destroy it in another…that sort of deal. But in general, the design does it’s job to deliver the message we wanted to get across…simplicity in presentation and unobstructed content accessibility.

Here are a few things we were thinking…

• Sticky post.
• Slider options, currently only one is available.
• Possibly removing the top level heading on blog and portfolio pages?

Anyhow, we would definitely like to get some feedback, we really want to get this thing up and we feel that it would be a great addition to the collection. All comments, critiques, suggestions and criticism welcome. Thanks.

Link to theme: Simpl Demo Site

I don’t see anything wrong with this, im actually surprised, its one of the better ones that got rejected.

Three things though:

• Increase the size of the menu text.
• Add More Skins
• On the shortcodes page change the title We Love Shortcodes to We Hate Shortcodes no developer likes shortcodes.

Hi Allur,

I’ve got also 3 different Themes rejected by the reviewers for various reasons – so may my words don’t have enough weight for you but may you still consider to give them a go.

First of all, I really like your design, while it is very minimalistic it offers also a huge set of features as far as I could see. But the thing is I believe that the reviewer theme is looking for something more unique. Since there are coming everyday more and more authors to themeforest that puts them in the situation to select carefully who will get accepted and who not. It seems also that its not the main focus to offer countless of features and hundreds of options to customize the theme via a few clicks – they seem to prefer to get kind of niche themes with just the minimum required amount of options which can be offered while not be possibly feeling overhelming for potential buyers.

I can’t exactly tell you how you could modify the theme that it gets accepted but just try to fix all the issues you already found and maybe consider refining the menu (submenu) regarding response times. I think also you need to do some magic in terms of the visual esthetics – but since this theme is indended to be minimal this would possibly not an easy task.

May you should also consider to include some preset styles – maybe a dark one as well. And maybe include some custom widgets. I think a custom post widget with a thumbnail preview could enhance the overall look and feel.

Hope that helps

ThemeProvince said
I don’t see anything wrong with this, im actually surprised, its one of the better ones that got rejected.

Three things though:

• Increase the size of the menu text.
• Add More Skins
• On the shortcodes page change the title We Love Shortcodes to We Hate Shortcodes no developer likes shortcodes.

Haha, thanks for the kind words and useful suggestions! Definitely noted.

As far as the skins go, I really don’t think the design would work with anything other than a dark or “inverted” scheme in addition to the clean, white one that we have. We do have several color options in the admin but, they are specific to the link states and menus. Perhaps a dark version could be useful….

Allur said

ThemeProvince said
I don’t see anything wrong with this, im actually surprised, its one of the better ones that got rejected.

Three things though:

• Increase the size of the menu text.
• Add More Skins
• On the shortcodes page change the title We Love Shortcodes to We Hate Shortcodes no developer likes shortcodes.

Haha, thanks for the kind words and useful suggestions! Definitely noted.

As far as the skins go, I really don’t think the design would work with anything other than a dark or “inverted” scheme in addition to the clean, white one that we have. We do have several color options in the admin but, they are specific to the link states and menus. Perhaps a dark version could be useful….

In terms of design then I would agree with you but this is Themeforest where a sh*t load of options and skins will sell more than a well designed theme with limited options and only one skin.

infuse01 said
Hi Allur,

I’ve got also 3 different Themes rejected by the reviewers for various reasons – so may my words don’t have enough weight for you but may you still consider to give them a go.

First of all, I really like your design, while it is very minimalistic it offers also a huge set of features as far as I could see. But the thing is I believe that the reviewer theme is looking for something more unique. Since there are coming everyday more and more authors to themeforest that puts them in the situation to select carefully who will get accepted and who not. It seems also that its not the main focus to offer countless of features and hundreds of options to customize the theme via a few clicks – they seem to prefer to get kind of niche themes with just the minimum required amount of options which can be offered while not be possibly feeling overhelming for potential buyers.

I can’t exactly tell you how you could modify the theme that it gets accepted but just try to fix all the issues you already found and maybe consider refining the menu (submenu) regarding response times. I think also you need to do some magic in terms of the visual esthetics – but since this theme is indended to be minimal this would possibly not an easy task.

May you should also consider to include some preset styles – maybe a dark one as well. And maybe include some custom widgets. I think a custom post widget with a thumbnail preview could enhance the overall look and feel.

Hope that helps

Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, the theme is certainly intended to be minimal and well…simple in aesthetics, hence the name.

I don’t feel that we have too much functionality in the admin but, maybe I don’t know what too much is. All of the functionality that we have in place is required to execute our theme…we could drop the map functionality I suppose…

The dark version seems to be something that at least 2 people have agreed on…could be something to explore. Thanks again!

As far as design goes, well done. You have done a great job on this. However, I see two major issues with your theme:

1. Your theme is is very bright and uses a small font. I actually dig that style, a lot, but the usability of the theme drops down because of that; Most 30+ users will have a hard time reading it, and if they can read it, it will still be a bit uncomfortable due to the very light colors you are using.

2. As ThemeProvince said, WP themes are more likely to get accepted if they have an exaggerated amount of features. And this is something quite discussed, as a lot of buyers are actually asking for faster, easier-to-set-up themes.

Good luck man,
Chris

crozer said
As far as design goes, well done. You have done a great job on this. However, I see two major issues with your theme:

1. Your theme is is very bright and uses a small font. I actually dig that style, a lot, but the usability of the theme drops down because of that; Most 30+ users will have a hard time reading it, and if they can read it, it will still be a bit uncomfortable due to the very light colors you are using.

2. As ThemeProvince said, WP themes are more likely to get accepted if they have an exaggerated amount of features. And this is something quite discussed, as a lot of buyers are actually asking for faster, easier-to-set-up themes.

Good luck man,
Chris

+1 agree with too much bright and small font, although your themes look so awesome

I quite like it, and I’ve been dying to create a minimalist theme myself. This one goes into my themes to buy for a future project list. Gotta love how you incorporated double slashes as your arrows / bullets.

As for the design, I can see a few issues why this might not get accepted:

1. Font sizes. I like small fonts, but as stated by the others, some are just too small for some people to read. For me, the navigation menu is too small. The recent posts and other articles captions are too small and are quite unnoticeable.
2. Some visual elements are too light. At my first glance at the page, I had to tilt my screen to see the distinction of the footer, and the horizontal lines for the recent posts and other articles separators.
3. The “connect” links in the contact page do not look like links. Replacing these with grayscale icons might make it awesome also.
4. (not a reason but this is for your own sake) Don’t put WordPress 3.1.2 as a feature, WP’s releases new version numbers at a very fast pace. You might forget to update it in the future and buyers might see the old version number in the demo
5. Add more shortcodes. Yes there is a shortcode craze going on around for quite some time now, but I think it’s just proper. Buyers usually have this frame of mind of how they would layout their pages and what should be in them, shortcodes are their tools. Video shortcodes I think is a must nowadays.

Personally, I prefer clever implementations of the color picker + timthumb + png image layering than a preset of 10 or so skins.

Thank you all for your suggestions and positive feedback! We are taking it all into consideration and we are going to re-submit after some tweaking. Anymore feedback is welcome and we will cross our fingers! Cheers!