Theme hard rejected - seeking honest feedback to guide next item

Envato Authors Theme Authors
1

Hi all

I recently submitted a theme and was hard rejected with the reason “unfortunately we found it isn’t at the quality standard required to move forward”.

I have read the guidelines which list a few broad reasons for this.

I’d love some feedback from someone more experienced for any more specific reasons for the rejection. In particular I’d like to know if you think it’s an issue with design, code or features?

Here is the demo site for the theme.

It’s a helpdesk/knowledgebase/support centre/documentation template. It was submitted to Site Templates. It’s static HTML, with Tailwind CSS and Alpine JS. It’s intentionally focussed on this specific use case. It has templates for: homepage (with live search), category landing, article, FAQs, search results, contact, and ticketing/chat.

Thanks in advance for your help

Gavin
Kick Wheel Themes (<-- note my profile page hasn’t been updated in a long time and has broken links; images - could this have factored into the decision or do they only consider the item itself?)

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@KickWheel

With respect it’s boring. I’m not having a go since you took the time and trouble to create something, but it’s just too basic and would never meet approval on that type of skeleton framework

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Thanks for taking the time to look. I definitely understand where you’re coming from.

When you say ‘too basic’ are you referring to the range of features, or the visual design? And if the latter, do you mean the design is too stripped back, needs more personality – or something else?

Thanks again for your input.

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@KickWheel

Visually it is simply not enticing to look at -
People could probably find something similar for free.

Font styling could be better

Range of features are limited.

The page coding is poor - there are unclosed tags and various errors

Run your page through that and you will see exactly what I mean.

I don’t want to rain on what you have done, but if you search on Envato what is there already, then you can see how much you need to change to reach those standards.

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Hello KickWheel, visually it looks alright, but i think the main problem is that it isn’t focussed on a certain niche. Which makes it a little bland and i can’t really find a targeted audience that was meant for this theme.

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@UnloadedWebdesign good points!

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Thanks again for your input. @UnloadedWebdesign I do agree it’s a subdued, neutral design and this was intentional. I was considering the end user and thinking the priority would be for something stripped back (as a helpdesk is content-focused rather than flashy/sales-y) and flexible/easily customisable (change a hero image plus 1/2 colours to make it suit any product which it’s being used for). But from your experience it sounds like perhaps that’s not what Envato are looking for/what will sell well?

@123Simples I will address those validator errors, not sure how they slipped through as I did test as I went along, code quality is very important to me. The vast majority of those errors though are from W3C complaining about Alpine’s syntax (like x-if, x-bind:class etc) which can’t be avoided – do you know if Envato staff will be familiar with this, or will they just see the errors as a red flag immediately? Maybe I should mention this in the comments when I submit my next item?

Thanks again

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I feel like Envato is focussed on designs that are unique and are for a certain targeted audience instead of neutral designs, although i am not an expert.

1 Like
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@KickWheel

I cannot comment on how Envato choose to approve or reject any given submission. In your case however, if I WERE IN CHARGE of what makes the grade, then I would have to sadly say I would reject it. The theme is too basic - it is missing some key elements, and to be frank, it would not make me look twice at buying it.

There is nothing there that shouts out premium - it’s basically the bare bones of what someone could make themselves.