Originally published at: https://community.envato.com/monthly-rollup-march-2018/
Check out some of the cool things we’re working on at Envato HQ and read all the latest news, announcements and updates from this past month!
Elements UX/UI Kit Contest
We’re running an Elements contest to find the best new UX/UI Kits on Envato Elements! By publishing a new item in this category, you can win a share in $2,500 worth of prizes. Make sure to submit your entry form by 11:59pm (AEDT) April 20, 2018. Check out more details on how to nominate your UX/UI Kits and terms & conditions here.EuroTour is Coming Soon!
This June, we’re sending a number of Envatians on the long journey from Australia to Europe for EuroTour 2018! Last year we participated in EuroTour, a series of meetups across Europe that gathered Envato staff and the author community together.This year, we are planning on visiting:
- London, United Kingdom
- Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Berlin, Germany
- Moscow, Russia
- Kiev, Ukraine
- Belgrade, Serbia
- Bucharest, Romania
During these meetups, participants share stories, strategies, industry insights and establish strong personal connections with others involved (all while enjoying delicious food and drinks – or two!). The feedback we received from the community last year was resoundingly positive, so here we are, ready to do it again!
We will be releasing the specific dates, hosts and venues of our Meetups very soon, so keep an eye out for it and read all the details in the announcement here.
New Help Center for Authors
\We have now launched our new Author Help Center - a single source of information for authors across Envato’s ecosystem. Our goal with this change is to unify our author help experience and eliminate confusion around what support articles relate to authors and those that relate to customers. What’s the impact to authors? Most links will be changing. We’ve got a new base url at https://help.author.envato.com and articles from the Envato Market Help Center and the Envato Elements Author Help Center have been migrated over.We’re doing our best to clean up all the urls within the apps authors use to upload and manage items but some links may break as a result of these changes. Feel free to let us know via a support ticket or on this forums thread if you find one and we’ll get an update request to our engineering team.
In the coming months, we’ll also be launching updated content requirements across a number of marketplaces. We’ve already begun with new articles and updates in place for VideoHive authors looking to upload Premiere Pro templates.
So, have a look around, let us know what you think and what content you’d like to see on the Author Help Center in the future. Read the full announcement here.
Envato Websites
This month, we made some exciting updates to the discovery experience on Websites! The team has spent the past few months building and refining a range of improvements making it easier than ever to find a great design.With this new functionality, we’ve now got multiple ways for customers to drill down into results to find exactly what they want - helping businesses and individuals find the website for their industry. The new search and filters will also do wonders for our SEO. With thousands of new and targeted URLs, we have a great opportunity to target niches, and rank highly.
Check it here and read more about it on the forums.
ThemeForest Search Results Testing
The Conversion team are continuing their ongoing work in optimizing the experience for customers by testing how key features, highlighting and tags directly impacts search results. The latest rounds of testing has shown that the same set of items had a higher add to cart and conversion rate with the addition of ‘Key Features’ than when they did not. Read the full announcement here.The team are now looking at testing Search/Category pages to determine if an image carousel helps users select and purchase an item. Watch this space!
‘See More’ Feature on Elements
You can now click See More on any photo to do a ‘visual search’ for similar photos, plus you can still add search terms and all the refinements you know and love. Check it out in action here!SEO Sitemap
As part of the ongoing effort to improve search ranking, the SEO and Traffic team implemented an Envato wide Sitemap, that will have its own page, in which a link will be placed into the footer across all Envato sites. This will effectively increase search engine visibility for keyword terms related to the linked category.It will also help search engine bots understand the relationship between all Envato websites, along with stabilizing and improving organic traffic. A link to the Sitemap page will be placed into the footer of the following sites in the coming weeks. This includes:
- Market
- Tuts+
- Elements
- Studio
- Sites
- Websites Marketplace
Envato WordPress Plugin Update
We've released version 2.0 of the official Envato Market Plugin. This plugin helps customers receive updates to their premium Themes & Plugins purchased through Envato Market.Version 2 improves the plugin stability, fixes bugs and paves the way for the introduction of new features in the coming months. Along with a UI refresh, version 2.0 of the Envato Market Plugin:
- Fixes compatibility with the latest WordPress core update that was preventing single item tokens from operating
- Enables compatibility with the latest version of Envato’s API
- Fixes JavaScript bugs
- Improves error reporting when API updates fail
- Improves code structure to pass the latest WordPress Coding Standard tests
- Improves the layout of the Envato Market settings and item pages
We’ve created a new landing page for the Envato Market Plugin that authors can use to download the plugin. We’ve also made the GitHub repo public so that authors can follow progress, contribute and help us identify any bugs as they implement it in their items.
Authors are encouraged to implement this plugin in their items so that customers have a reliable and consistent experience across products. We would like to see the Envato Market Plugin become the primary update method for WordPress items on Envato Market, especially as we begin to roll out new features.
Check out all the details in the forum announcement here.
That’s it for the past month, folks! If you have any questions or want to continue the conversation, comment here and connect with your fellow author community.
