[Hard Reject] Viva WP Theme. Please help me

Envato Authors Theme Authors
1

Hi, dear Experts. I need your feedback relating to my theme VIVA (New/Magazine/Blog). This is my first theme, and it has been hard rejected with the following comments:

Sorry to say, but theme is not yet ready to be included in WordPress category.
Design needs lots of improvements and because of that I am unable to provide any specific details.

This is my theme:
http://themes.edarco.net/viva/

Please, help me to understand what to improve?

Thank you in advance!

P.S. Still cannot understand the approach of the reviewer. I asked different people (not related to dev) to compare my theme’s design with several newly accepted items in “News” category (for example - http://themeforest.net/item/notiz-clean-magazine-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/13209437 etc.), all liked it more. Is this a some kind of a discrimination? Or I was not lucky with the reviewer?

2

Its not a bad start but there’s room for improvement and never any discrimination against anyone

The shadows do not really work in news themes

Logo feels a bit cramped, pixellated and small as does the categories menu

Having about and contact links that do not go anywhere appears unfinished

author pages could be more advanced and the posts themselves could have author info more prominently

generally the design feels a bit outdated and lacks premium refinement

a fair bit of avoidable validation issues

generally the typography needs attention throughout esp. post info, titles and consistency

1 Like
3

Thank you very much, will consider all your remarks!

4

Dear friends, it would be very useful to hear more opinions!

5

Avoid using excessive shade.
Boxed layout type is not much future, try an “airy” layout.
Fixed right sidebar have scroll lag, use this script for solve this : http://stickyjs.com
Work at typography . Read this before :
https://medium.com/product-design-ux-ui/26-digital-typography-rules-for-beginners-a04c6a5aaff3#.mcritetmf
http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/safely-match-design-typography/
Try to work harder at design!
Good Luck !

6

Thank you. Very useful!

7

Its really nice work, but some how i feel it needs some touches to be completed… maybe it has too many white areas which need to be adjusted. Also the logo i think its little squeezed.

But over all its great looking theme

Good luck

8

Thank you very much. I will take your notes into account!

9

Just some thoughts I would like to share regarding to bugs that were mentioned here:

shadows - both Sidebar Widgets Shadows and Thumbnail Shadows may be disabled through the Themes options at Admin Panel.
logo - again can be changed through the Options
About and Contact links - just for demo and should not affect the reviewer’s decision
Author page - info could be detailed through Admin panel -> user profiles. There I’ve added many options like Cover Image, Social Networks etc - and the reviewer should have seen it
Layout - could be changed via Options panel - Frame, Box, Full

Till now, I thought that reviewer’s first of all look at the sent theme’s .zip file and see all the options they can change through Admin panel

Anyway, I see there is no other variant - I will change the design.

10

You compare your work with Notiz theme but , this one has a clean flat design with a good attention to details, while yours has a lot of shadows, really bad pictures that don’t work with your design, everything looks so crowded. This has a good start but it’s not ready to be approved.

11

I understand, but does reviewer look at demo site? Shouldn’t he look at the sent theme zipped file itself? Maybe I put empty images at demo site for now.

P.S. As I wrote above - all shadows could be disabled from Panel

12

Look at this one theme - do you think it’s fonts are better than the ones I’ve used ?

http://demo.favethemes.com/wp/magzilla/demo01/

Or whether fonts are enough reason for “Hard Reject”? Couldn’t they “Soft Reject” it and tell me to set appropriate fonts?

13

Your header logo and menu look not good, Try another font and increase all paddings