Advice For Getting My Theme Approved

Envato Authors Author Hangout
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I submitted my first theme a few days ago. It was rejected, and it is unclear as to why. Any experienced authors here willing to give me some pointers on how to get approved?

It was rejected for “The overall quality of your submission does not meet our aesthetic and technical requirements and will need to be improved before being resubmitted. Unfortunately we’re not able to provide more specific feedback for your submission at this time.”

The theme I made was for Blogger. It offers fadein sections on scroll, smooth scrolling, and full screen slider. Something that no other Blogger theme here has. It also features a customizable homepage(only a hand full of themes here have), pre-installed awesome fonts icons, and over 50 class selectors for stylizing post content. It’s fully responsive, Ad ready, an written in HTML5/CSS3/Microdata.

Compared to any other theme sold by themeforest for Blogger, it is one of the highest yslow score(if not the highest overall), and highest pagespeed scores that I have seen based on demos. Average Yslow score for modern/responsive Blogger themes here at themeforst is 75, while mine is 83.

Some of the problems I noticed after rejection was I had one error in the Chrome console, which I fixed already. I felt the preview image was of low quality, and that has been fixed.

Some of my concerns are there is 25 warnings in the Chrome console(all related to Blogger’s injected CSS/JS files, which I have no control of). I’m also concerned that my theme only supports IE9+(because of it’s media queries), but I have seen some WP themes only supporting IE9+ get approved, so I don’t know. My last concern is that my them may appear to be too plain, but that was intentional because it’s a minimal theme with great customization(I wanted to give my customers greater flexibility).

EDIT: I also wanted to mention another concern. I used Data URI to reduce HTTP requests.

I would post a link to my demo for others to look at, but don’t want to get banned on grounds for spamming or “self-promotion”.

Any advice on how to get my theme approved is invited. Thanks.

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You can post this under item discussion and provide a preview link.

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Like Anps said above, you should post a link. What your theme offers, all sounds great but how does it look. If we cant see the theme we cant give any constructive critique.

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Thanks for the replies.

I cannot move the topic, and I don’t want to make a duplicate post. So I guess I will post the demo link here.

Link: http://xarpixels-revitalize-template.blogspot.com/ (beware of template changes/updating).

For those that are not aware, Blogger is not designed to have a homepage, yet I managed to find a way to do it anyway.

Thanks.

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It “looks nice” but you have a lot of validation issues which needs to be fixed if you want to submit here


The logo and tagline etc could be improved

Some of the typography is a little basic and strange to have headings smaller than body copy

The design looks a bit basic and outdated and does not feel “complete” in terms of elements and “purposeful pages” (although I get it is for Blogger so there is only so much you would want to add).

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Thanks for the reply.

Alot of the validation issues is with Blogger, not my theme design. In fact, if you look at the modern/responsive Blogger theme demos here at themeforest, you’ll see that they have close to 200 validation errors.

As far as it being basic, all that was intentional as it’s a minimal theme.

Perhaps the problem isn’t with the theme, so much as the demo content?

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This thread is now in › Item Discussion

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Dzinc said

This thread is now in › Item Discussion

Thanks.

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Hey man cool start love the main page look but i think you should re think the inner pages because it just does not jive with the main template.

Make sure when you do the inner pages you come up with a design idea how the inner pages are going to come into or load into the main page.

Just keep on doing what you are doing.

Cheers

Lester