It's pretty good way to browse actually. My pet-peeve with sites like wrapbootstrap, etc is that you have to open each theme, click the live preview button and then click the "remove frame" icon to get the feel. Then unless you opened it in a new window, you forget where you started. Your site solves that problem. Good work!
P.S. To make browsing even faster, maybe you can add up down arrows in the lightbox too, so that I can move on to the next theme and find it even faster. Just my 2c.
Indeed, I was spending 15 min minimum for each theme, and then there are themes like Bridge that has 200 different style sub-themes (or demos), where each can be used actually for any website. So, who has time to go through all?
This is why we made it very easy to go through themes and their related sub-themes. It can be even improved further with your great arrow down idea and a modal.
I agree - this is better than most sites for browsing themes. However, I still find it hard to get a feel for a theme's style when a giant cover image makes up 90% of a screenshot for a theme. I understand that most modern themes are image-heavy (especially on the home page), and full-page thumbnails are a good way to see the high-level layout characteristics of a theme, but I'm often more on the lookout for good typography, navigational elements, icons, etc.
Not sure about the best solution for that, but it makes me think there's probably a better way to highlight both the high-level and low-level details of a theme at a glance.
Yeah - that works. I was more thinking of something in the main list view (possibly a closeup thumbnail or two of some notable visual details) to make those details more apparent when scrolling through many themes, but the click-to-zoom/lightbox certainly fills the need in a better way than many other sites do.
Either way, the site looks really nice - good job!
We have already the possibility of intervening automated algorithms and adding custom screenshots, so if we allow theme authors to claim their themes they can add those close-ups themselves, which would be an obvious next step.
However, today this is technically challenging problem since the screenshots are not made manually, but with supervised algorithms. I dream about a day that we can pinpoint visually which area of the image are visually interesting/aesthetic to make a close-up, utilizing Neural Networks better. We need Deepmind for themes, the way google has it for their Photos.
Hey everyone! I'm one of the creators of BestofThemes and would love to answer any questions that you may have about it. We have created numerous projects over years and we had always the problem of finding a matching theme to our product. The current process is amazingly time consuming and consists of going to each theme provider, clicking on each theme and checking the demo; mind you only themeforest has 8000 themes for wordpress. One can do probably 20-30 checks before giving up. So, to solve our own itch we made this platform, a curated collection of free and commercial themes added daily, with a screenshot of their most important pages together with their mobile view to quickly browse through. Please take a look and let us know how we can improve the platform before going public. Many thanks!
Thank you! We are currently hooking into ThemeForest, WrapBootstrap, TemplateMonster and several individual free theme providers. After this beta release, we are planning to add top houses like ElegantThemes as well. One of the main points, and expensive! additions different than most of other showcase website is that we spend lot of time curating the free themes as well.
Funny you'd say that. I also dislike the latest trend of what we joke as *Wordpress Themes: The New Operating Systems of the Web". So bloated and so slow.
One of those boring days I actually tried that. Since we parse every page we know what's inside, how many connections they make, and the load times before and after DOM load. basically as you listed. You could then actually filter based on that, but you know, it is a very power user feature. Maybe we do it like an "advanced filters" section that does not confuse normal users, you know, for fun.
However the fact that you only show a very small number of themes before making me click & wait till new ones load makes this not very good. You should load way more at once and consider adding infiniscroll.
Totally feel what you are saying Phil, and specially since we wanted to use the website ourselves we knew we had to find a better way. The problem with infinite scroll is the user RAM, which quickly fills when we add more and more themes, and becomes really sluggish. Next, we tried Google Photos style of loading but then the JS load became very high and all kind of browser quirks. So in the spirit of lean method we decided to skip perfection and make it great enough. I will increase the number of themes per page to 20 not to stress the RAM, and maybe later to 30. Please keep your comments coming since it will help us understand the way you use the website and improve it.
Great layout, great idea. The only problem I can see (I am Elite Theme author on TF) is that these demos are updated/changing/adding almost weekly by theme authors, and managing these 1000+ themes and 20,000+ links to demos will be incredibly hard on your part, I would recommend adding a BIG button which will make theme authors to help you curate their own themes, I am pretty sure they will be glad to do that in order to get more exposing to their items.
You have touched the point that made this project more than just another curated list of themes website built on wordpress and required a full team of top engineers and designers.
From one side we have users that want to find the right theme for their new website or client, and are devastated by shear amount of new themes everyday so they tend to pick up from "the top 100 themes" all the time.
From the other point, we have theme authors that are, to our feeling, pushing their limits of getting new users onboard (e.g. TF channel saturation), and also struggle with giving users the impression of how great their themes are on these marketplaces. Discovery is a challenge.
The technical challenge of this project has been always how to manage 20000+ links, have their screenshot taken for different screen-sizes, understand what is inside, store the very large amount of image content on distributed systems, annotate the screenshots and themes, and make it damn easy to search for users. This we have achieved this through large amount of automation on our micro-services, machine-learning and supervision of our team. Today we can add up to 50 themes per day with our current resources (mind you TF adds 80 per day, so we are picky for now). Updating would be the extension of this process, so instead of adding new we reindex the old.
Overall, we are very happy that theme authors like this project as well and feel that it fills a new era of theme distribution. We will definitely empower them with their own content once our traction is enough for them to jump onboard. This is happening quite a bit faster than we thought. Top authors on TF are already contacting us to claim their themes and sending us suggestions how to improve the platform even further. This is a bit scary :)
Yes. When we were doing pre-project work we looked at the growth statistics of all the marketplaces, what kind of themes gets downloaded, if there is pattern, and which prices are they likely to succeed. There, of course, you see the number of new themes added, update frequency and popularity as a side-effect. Overall, in whole eco-system there are around up to 200 themes added daily for various platforms when we did the study, with TF pushing the most out for wordpress.
"It was the best of themes. It was the worst of themes."
Great literary reference but I think you're also providing a service if you tell the world which themes to avoid. Rotten Tomatoes is popular due to their brutal honesty as well as their accuracy. And sometimes a beautiful theme has real implementation problems that aren't visually obvious.
In addition to the comment about filtering by size, etc, I'm also concerned about operational features - here are a few that come to mind:
- Bugs or lack of them
- Performance (you've been to those dog slow sites)
- Security issues (a category of bugs worth their own line)
- Dependencies - a 200kB theme really isn't 200kB if it requires 20 Javascript and CSS files packing another 4MB on.
- Known use - there's a sweet spot since you don't want to be the only one using a theme. You also don't want 90% of the other sites on the Internet to look exactly like yours.
- Open-source versus closed-source (regardless of price)
Tempting indeed, and would be a radical service: Rotten Tomato for Themes. I really like the idea, and will discuss it with the team. Can be a test for one of our sprints.
The conversion rates from someone visiting your site to making a purchase of whatever product you're selling is incredibly important in terms of revenue. You've already spent money getting the person to your site, you just need to close the deal.
Things like sliders or just generally poor design can have a big impact on conversions.
If you tracked usage of a range of ecommerce themes you could probably find a way to know which ones had great conversion rates and which ones didn't perform so well. So now when people are looking for a new ecommerce theme they can filter by the ones with the highest conversion rates.
Thank you! by the way we curate themes by hand and add tags to it, to make it searchable as well. Of course, today's release is a beta release to get feedback from the community, but afterwards we plan to add more searchable content, e.g. tags, topics etc to each individual page even. This means you will be able to search for "pricing pages" only as well.
Only thing I am missing is a „quality indicator“. I buy a lot of themes on TF and I usually just sort by „best sellers“ and then look at ratings and number of comments (aka number of problems). Thinking behind this is simply: more downloads --> more feedback --> more fixes --> better product.
This is the default sorting on the homepage, based on sales, and some other features. Definitely needs testing and improvements to give user the best theme matching their needs. Nobody has time to crawl thousands of themes.
Love this, would be cool also to list if there are any external links within theme by default and where those go to, also any libraries used as a dependency. Great presentation of themes though, much better than just the 1 main screen shot.
If you click on the title of each theme, it takes you to a detail page, where each screenshot has a link hover on top of it. Is this what you wanted? Anything else we can improve?
So refreshing to see a themes website that looks different and is way more functional. Thanks for this! I just wanted to point out that (at least for me) the filters are reset when I try to "order" by Featured, Popular or Newest.
Thank you for your feedback! Featured and Popular and Newest use different indices, so each time one is selected the filter is reseted. We'll try find a way around it in near future.
Ah finally! I as going nuts browsing theme sites and wished for a long time someone would build this. Thanks danialtz! Bookmarked. People keep asking me for a theme site so I'll recommend yours from now on.
Thank you zupa-hu! We had the same problem ourselves and this was to solve our own pain points. Say, I was working on an admin backend, and then forgot where I've seen a card element. Normally, you have to go again through all the sub-pages (some have 300) to find it. Now, I open the admin theme and very quickly go through all screenshots until I find it. Or sometimes use search.
On the note of marketplaces, is there any Russian equivalent (or the like) to Themeforest?
Doesn't need to be Russian, obviously. I'm not interested in language support, I'm just interested in seeing something other than themeforest/wrapbootstrap/creative-tim/creativemarket/templatemonster/boxedart (still a thing?), etc.
P.S. To make browsing even faster, maybe you can add up down arrows in the lightbox too, so that I can move on to the next theme and find it even faster. Just my 2c.