WordPress Theme Rejected, seeking feedback/QC help

We submitted our first WP theme & received a rejection notice but there was no reason given - we don’t even know if it was a hard/soft reject, although my guess is that it was a hard reject.

Here is the live demo, any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Daisy Lane Demo Site

Hi there,

The standards here are really high, and just from an aesthetics point of view, this doesn’t meet them, unfortunately. Just some quick notes:

  1. Your breadcrumbs aren’t aligned with your content

  2. You need to work on your vertical rhythm and use of negative space. Let your design breathe.

  3. You don’t have a maximum content width, so your design just keeps expanding forever. It looks really bad at large widths. You should keep the content area centered and around 960-1140px wide as a starting point. Consider readability - it’s difficult to read blocks of text more than about 640px wide (though this varies with font size of course).

  4. Form elements need styling work to look professional

  5. Alignment issues on the mobile menu (centering)

  6. The way the header works currently doesn’t look very good. Either make that background image scroll with the site, or make it fixed and layered on top of the content as you scroll.

  7. Get rid of the really light yellow lines around the widgets. Very difficult to see. If you’re going to use a border, you need some more padding there.

  8. General typography - I’m not sure your font choice really works here for the body text. Try choosing a font that complements your header font. Or maybe it just needs to be spaced better.

This doesn’t cover the actual coding of the theme, of course, so you may need to review that as well.

Take a look at some of the best selling designs here and see the type of high quality professional aesthetic they have. You’ll need a theme with that same level of design to compete here. Keep at it, you’ll definitely need another few iterations at least to get this in shape for submission.

Hope that helps!

2 Likes

Thanks for the feedback, I expected a rejection but I was hoping that we’d at least get some constructive feedback like you’ve given. I’m familiar with some of the top sellers on here & have no illusion that we’ll come anywhere close to them but we do want to provide quality products.

Thanks again sevenspark, your feedback is greatly appreciated!