WordPress Theme Hard-Rejected, Very Curious Why?

Envato Authors Theme Authors
1

Hi guys,
I haven’t sold any products on any Envato sites before, and was looking to start by selling a WordPress theme that I’ve been developing for a couple years now. After going through all of the lists of requirements to get listed on ThemeForest, and improving the theme code and functionality to spec, it’s simply been hard-rejected without any further information.

The theme has been well tested for over 2 years, and works great for all the installations I’ve made so far. Clients love it, and I’ve got to pretty substantial lengths to do everything the ‘WordPress Way’ wherever possible. I’m very curious to know exactly why you guys think this was hard rejected.

http://artdroid.phong.com/

Here is another some other sites using the same theme for another perspective:

Thoughts? I’m curious for second opinions around this.

2

Hi Phong,

In my opinion the design is not “smooth” enough, you should pay more attention to typography and spaces.

However, there is a bigger issue with your theme: it’s not really responsive. Just check it on smaller screen phones and you’ll see:

  • the main menu isn’t visible on mobiles
  • the footer also isn’t responsive

It can be a good idea to look at lots of approved themes on TF and you can check the approximate design level they expect from us…

3

“Design is the King on themeforest. You rather have poorly written code than bad design to get your way in the market. We’ll tackle the spaghetti code once approved”, Says my long time themeforest Elite author.

4

Try to borrow ideas from Google’s material design color charts on how to combine colors the right way while creating professional looks and feels of website templates.

5

It’s broken on mobile devices :slight_smile:

6

Hey guys, thanks for the reflections.

This is an interesting point about it being broken on mobile devices, because it works and looks fine to me and all my clients who have been using this theme after over a year of testing on a variety of mobile devices.

The site uses a device detection method referred to as RESS (Responsive with Server Side component), which basically checks which type of device is using the site, and serves custom templates based on that. You can test it for yourself on an actual mobile device, or with device spoofing in the Chrome dev tools.

Is this kind of technique prohibited by ThemeForest?

As for the colors, there is an option which dynamically samples colors from the primary featured image, and uses those colors equalized to create the colors used for each post. If it happens to look whacky, it’s easy for that feature to be disabled in the settings, and all the colors can be customized from within the WordPress customizer API.

Do you think that they’re rejecting it because it uses dynamically generated colors based on featured images?