Posts by SachaG

I think you should ask yourself two things to help you make it better:

- Why would anybody use my template rather than someone else’s? What are its selling points, and why does it stand out among the hundreds of templates on Themeforest?

- Did I do my absolute best on every single element of this? Is everything as good as it could be, and did I spend enough time on all the little details?

As other said this doesn’t meet the criteria of the PSD section. But don’t get discouraged, people who get their templates in that section usually have years of design experience behind them. It’s just a matter of perseverance and hard work.

I think it’s just that the template is not original enough. Don’t be afraid to let your creativity show through a little more! People who buy PSD templates usually buy them to learn from them or to adapt them, so I think it’s ok to be a little wilder than with a ready-to-use html or wordpress theme.

For example you could accentuate the warm and fuzzy feeling by using textures in more places, and accentuating the yarn/fabric theme.

From a more practical point of view, I would also say there are too many buttons. For example I can count 10 of them on the homepage, whereas most templates usually have a single call to action. And don’t use the same button style for the current page in the nav, since it’s not clickable.

Lastly, you should fill in the homepage slider with some sample content. You could use your GraphicRiver items, it would be a great way to cross promote them (as long as you don’t give out the whole file inside the theme of course).

Let me know if that helps! PM me if you want more advice or if you want to chat about it

A forum structure for each item would definitley be great, thats true, but lets face it: thats a huge modification to the current structure, and even if Envato Devs would start immediatly it would probably last months to get the job done.

Maybe they could outsource the forums with something like http://vanillaforums.com/. It could be a closed forum, and the only way to access it would be through Themeforest once you’ve bought the item.

I’m not really familiar with hosted forums providers, but since Envato would be a huge customer I’m sure the provider could make an effort to provide a few authentication features. Then again, I can understand not wanting to give away control of an important part of your business.

@freshface thanks! glad you enjoyed the article.

Another thing we could do to manage support is build it into the wordpress theme from the start. For example, test for a PHP setting and display your own error message instead of letting the user see the server’s error. Of course it’s a lot more work, but at least you only need to do it once.

Another example: one of the most common problem I get is that buyers install the theme in the “themes/xyz theme/” directory instead of “themes/xyz/”. The space in the path creates all kind of problems with the theme’s javascript. If I weren’t so lazy I would set up a quick PHP test to display an error message if there’s a space, and explains what to do.

I recently wrote an article about making money designing themes on Six Revisions, and had a nice talk with Kriesi in the comments.

Basically he was saying that support is taking more and more of an author’s time, to the point where it’s 30% development and 70% support.

I was thinking about the problem, and wondering if a solution could be offering paid support. For example, buyers could pay a monthly fee and get access to a private support forum. But the downside is that once buyer start paying for support, they might feel entitled to it and start asking even more questions.

An easier way would be simply replacing item comments by individual item support forums. Currently, nobody is going to read through 10 pages of comments to see if their question has already been answered, so you end up having to repeat yourself a lot.

Outsourcing support could also be a solution. For example, someone could provide some support for an author’s theme for a monthly fee, or for a “per question” fee.

As themes (and Wordpress as well) get more and more features. What’s more, Wordpress-savvy users are probably already well aware of Themeforest, so we can assume that new buyers are more often than not going to be Wordpress beginners. So I think user’s support needs will only grow bigger, and I hope we can find a solution soon!

I got it to work on my theme, maybe checking out the code will help you?

http://silverio.sachagreif.com/category/portfolio/

http://silverio.sachagreif.com/wp-content/themes/silverio/js/portfolio.js

I’m a little late, and most of these points have probably already been adressed here, but it any case, I wrote an article a while ago about what to look for in a theme:

http://sixrevisions.com/wordpress/a-guide-to-premium-wordpress-themes/

Of course, I’m a theme designer first, not a theme buyer… so I hope I didn’t get it all wrong!

I like how the slideshow takes up the whole width of the browser (at least on my small macbook screen). Other than that I think the homepage could be improved, especially compared to your previous work. But I like the content pages.

The shadow hurts my eyes… It’s too strong IMHO .

Sorry but I don’t think it will get accepted. You need to pay more attention to detail. For example, make sure all the text is readable, and avoid spelling mistakes.

There’s a lot of good ideas though. The color is unusual, the texture is nice, and I like the stitching pattern too. You should take those ideas and try to develop them to make something more different and personal.