Rejected...get the coffee

Well it looks like it’s time to start another theme and will need lots of coffee for this. Anyway, my first two themes submitted were rejected, again with form letters and no specifics other than a broad statement of ”...Your template does not provide the necessary design quality to compete in the marketplace” (gotta love those emails!).

The theme: BioSphere

I suppose what is needed here is to get the opinions of others regarding my BioSphere WordPress theme and any improvements you can suggest will help make it better….including knowledge for future themes. Thanks in advance!

I thought it was a pretty nice theme actually. Maybe that swoosh thing at the top might be a bit dated. But nothing major. Maybe they had a problem with the code itself? Have you had the script validated?

Thank you for the comment…the curved top and bottom was something I wanted to do rather than have a typical squared look like every website seems to have, whether fixed width or full width. As for the validation etc…I actually used a WordPress theme checker on it which gave it 100% pass, but the html had about 8 things in the w3c validator, but were not significant because one related to WordPress itself, another was a plugin that I was using on the demo site (only), and the remaining was a result of using HTML5 (which isn’t 100% accepted by w3c yet). I bypass a lot of css as the validator is still outdated. A lot of Themes in themeforest do not validate, even one very popular one (I won’t name it here), so I took the results of the validation as a grain of salt. Granted, it would be ideal to have an absolute perfect green checkmark for everything, including third party scripts and plugins

quick little update…a friend of mine suggested that this theme might not get approved because it’s a little too unique for themeforest, would that be a valid guess?

To be honest I totally love the theme and surprised it was rejected… actually almost all my stuff were too, so I would be afraid to comment and give you the wrong feedback

The only thing I could tell is that it doesn’t look like ALL the other themes on TF, which is in my opinion a plus, but I guess if it doesn’t fit in the herd—it’s no good.

My advice: - get a higher quality bg photo, this one looks a lil’ blurred - the header / footer waves are a little blurred too

try checking the theme from different monitors, before I got a good graphic card and high res monitor i was missing on these little details too.

hope this helps, good luck!

Hi loreleiweb…the photo in the background was originally 1.5 mb in size and I had to bring it it down enough, which does degrade the image a bit, but any photo a person uses could be different; they can just opt in for a solid colour background or pattern if they wish as well.

Anyway, thanks for the comments.

If your theme does not provide the necessary design quality then snow is black and Mediterranean is a desert.

Who was your reviewer? Were there a few personal words with the points explaining what might be wrong in your theme? Or was it automatic general letter?

I am sure you must write a ticket to support and to demand explanations if you got only the automatic letter.

About background–I do not see it blurry. I use Mac (1 year old), 1920×1080 resolution. On my computer it looks perfect.

Hi virtuti….thanks for the reply and comments…I’m not sure it’s right for me to say names of who reviewed it but there was no specifics to what elements in detail, but it was one of their form letter type emails. Unless the lead reviewer or another one reads this and is curious about reviewing it again, I’m willing to resubmit, otherwise, I will simply continue with my next theme which is already started.

Yes, you are right, I should not ask who is the reviewer, it is incorrect and impolite from my side. Actually, it is not so important, important is whether it had been a letter with personal explanations or without them. Problem of automatic replies is that they do not give even a hint how and where to move further.

That is why it would be correct to ask for personal letter and explanations.

To my mind, I doubt that here you will find help about how to improve the theme. Everyone will tell you that your work is wonderful and nothing (or may be at somebody’s opinion almost nothing) to fix in it.

But to abandon it… I would not… I would try to get at least a couple of more grounded reasons why it was rejected.

I wish you good luck, you are very talented.

Thanks again virtuti….not to worry about the part asking who was the reviewer. But I agree that “specifics” should be given of what to change, for example, “adjust the margins between headings and content” or “try a different font for the menus” etc. However, I would imagine that the reviewers must have a lot of themes to review too, so I’m not sure how much time they really have to do a full explanation, although it would be proactive in the improvements of themes that do get rejected so the author isn’t left guessing what to change…they could end up changing something that didn’t need changing.

Anyway, I will decide how to proceed with my Biosphere theme if I will try once more at Theme Forest or keep it selling on my site.