[Soft Reject] Advice on getting accepted?

Envato Authors Theme Authors
1

My new theme is getting the dreaded “Soft Rejection”. The feedback was:

  • The overall design and aesthetic quality aren’t ready for ThemeForest. It looks slightly dated too.
  • The content area is pretty generic and plain, and it will need more imaginations

Here is the demo: http://www.buchmanndesign.com/OpenhouseOpenRoadSwitcher/

What is it that is making it look dated? It’s inspired by Google “Material Design” and I think that helps give it a modern feel. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. … thanks!

2

Blog thumbnails are broken:

image
Zrzut ekranu 2016-01-15 o 19.03.26.png1263×1103 954 KB

Try different shadow under boxes.

3

OMG, I didn’t realize that… Seems to only be in IE. Will fix asap.

Any other suggestions? What about it is not aesthetically good enough for Themeforest?

Thanks for any additional input that anyone has!

4

This happend to me in Firefox, newest version. Not IE.

5

In new firefox, if you use img-responsive class.

6

The images already have the img-responsive class. If it didn’t the image would actually be WAY larger, haha. I ended up fixing this with CSS “overflow”.

Anyway, that was a bug and surely not why it was soft rejected (as it was not mentioned). Any additional comments would be appreciated. :slightly_smiling:

7

Use width 100% for img-responsive class in your custom style.

8

That broken image can be a reason but the rejection is not only because of that. IMO your content area are with generic blocks only and as per my experience with my recent template approval i got the same issues with the review. Year old designs of mine that still sells pretty good, reviewer finds them dated now. So i suggest adding some parallax background sections in your content area. Add some unique design/graphics at some part of template. Apart from this advice i found few things with your design which i personally do not like:

Vertical middle alignment: http://drops.imithemes.com/ZMvb
Shadows and hover border/shadow effect: http://drops.imithemes.com/W9LK
Text alignment with button: http://drops.imithemes.com/15bj5
Vertical spacing rhythm: http://drops.imithemes.com/1bVsO
Alignment: http://drops.imithemes.com/yfnf
Button alignment with text: http://drops.imithemes.com/1kKNo I know you have padding in button hover with bg color but it looks not aligned

Hope this helps you somehow to get your work approved! Thanks

1 Like
9

Thanks so much for the constructive feedback! Will look into each thing and do necessary changes.

10

From my point of view the main problem for the approval of the template is the low quality in terms of overall design.

I encourage you to search the current trend and renew all the template, I do not doubt his abilities on the encoding probably with little tiny mistakes.

Talk to your designer and I am sure you can make the necessary changes to its prompt approval

Good luck

11

@Th3s A lot of this thread’s responses are helpful to this creator as they provide specific details. Unfortunately, your response adds no value to this author as you have added nothing specific and just said general things that aren’t actually useful in improving this product. You will be of much more help to this community by offering specifics - like how the above users have (ie shadows, alignment, adding screenshots, providing ideas etc).

12

Lol, thanks. The design goal wasn’t to copy the trends and look like other themes. If I did then the reviewer would probably say it’s not unique. So many look so alike and the goal was to stand apart with something a bit different.

That said, if anyone has additional constructive & helpful ideas, please share! Thanks!:slight_smile: