my WP Theme soft rejected because the design... Advices needed

Your item Monroe – Responsive WordPress Magazine, News isn’t quite ready for ThemeForest. This is the reason given by our item inspector:

The overall design looks very crowded and messy, it is not a good sign especially for a magazine theme.

demo: http://monroe.wordpress-control.com/

any help please ??

In this day and age, images rule when it comes to design. There is far to much text on the page for starters, even for a magazine style theme.

Just my preference

One of the major problems I see is that the drop down menus there is some spacing in-between the links when you hover them that shows the background and that looks bad IMO . But other than that it’s a really nice theme!

UBL said
In this day and age, images rule when it comes to design.

I don’t agree at all! 90% of the buyers here don’t have fancy images at all, so their images will look absolutely ugly in your perfect template which makes images pop up

There are a lot of perfect websites with absolutely no images on them.. Just beautiful typography.

So giving the advice to fill up a theme with pretty images just to make it look good it’s an awful advice. The theme should look good with solid gray blocks instead of images! If you rely on your images to make a good design, than that design is a really bad one

RubenBristian said

UBL said
In this day and age, images rule when it comes to design.

I don’t agree at all! 90% of the buyers here don’t have fancy images at all, so their images will look absolutely ugly in your perfect template which makes images pop up

There are a lot of perfect websites with absolutely no images on them.. Just beautiful typography.

So giving the advice to fill up a theme with pretty images just to make it look good it’s an awful advice. The theme should look good with solid gray blocks instead of images! If you rely on your images to make a good design, than that design is a really bad one

I highly agree, images don’t make a design any better at all. Sometimes images can make it look worse. I would listen to his advice, it makes good since!

thank you so much guys

@themelux thank you themelux i will fix it

But I still don’t get it. what does he mean by “crowded and messy”? and How to make this template suitable for a magazine theme

You guys are mis reading what i said, i didnt mean add more images…

I meant give less text.

Its to crowded!

I disagree with the comments of the reviewer and design as we know is very subjective. Your theme IMO is far better than the average WP theme and deserves an opportunity. The font size in the main nav is a bit large for my tastes but obviously that’s an easy change to make. Perhaps some different background colors for secondary content would help maintain focus and give a little more clarity to the design.

I would do the following:
1. Add some space between the recent posts items
2. Use smaller tweet and like box sizes
3. Add vertical padding between post headlines, dates and post content
4. Reduce the size of the nav text
5. Go through and add vertical padding anywhere that spacing seems tight. For example, the about us image and opening paragraph. The top of the social sharing div and the content.
6. Add vertical padding to the footer copyright.

Aside from those small spacing items, it’s a nice design.

thank you so much guys

i will take your suggestions carefully