Comments on: My Premium Theme Experience

By: Sai Kumar

Sai Kumar — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 19:20:41 +0000

Hi, Finding the right theme for a blog is really a tough job. I faced many issues when i started my blog and now finally settled with Genesis Framework and made some CSS Modifications. Thanks for Sharing this Great Post!

By: yudayuda

yudayuda — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 12:06:27 +0000

Thanks for a great post. I had the exact same experience, with the exact same vendor – nightmarish CSS, lots of !important, many different stylesheets that get loaded *after* the child-theme CSS, and many references to the options-panel, even though they don’t seem to be required at all.

Real shame, as it’s a prominent vendor, and clients do love their themes and prices…

By: Sallie Goetsch

Sallie Goetsch — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 19:33:06 +0000

I have invariably found that the more theme options there are, the harder the theme is to modify via CSS. So for clients who really like the theme out of the box, or only want to make the kinds of changes that are possible via the options panel, themes like that are fine, but if a client wants something more customized, I pick a different sort of framework to work from. There was a presentation at WordCamp SF this year on “How Not to Design a Default Theme” and one of the items covered was theme options panels with billions of settings. I can only hope the trend for overloaded options panels will pass.

By: My Premium Theme Experience | CMS Radar

My Premium Theme Experience | CMS Radar — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 23:10:55 +0000

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By: Damian Gostomski

Damian Gostomski — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 20:14:37 +0000

I’ve had similar experiences recently at work. A client came to us with a premium theme wanting a few modifications…

Not only was the parent stylesheet littered with overly specific and !important declerations, it’s also use a responsive grid system where the grid classes where in the templates files, but they didn’t quote match what we wanted, so had to change almost every single on of those.

The other thing that really surprised me, was how inflexible some of it was… Want to feature some content on the homepage? Sure, but only if you want 3 columns that follows a very specific structure – Surely just throwing a widget area in there would be more flexible and save on a page in the theme options.

The total time spent modifying it (via a child theme, obviously), was probably close to what it would have been to build that site from scratch.

Do “premium” theme designers not realise that developers are a potentially huge market for them, and making it as flexible and extensive under the hood would be a huge selling point (yes, I know you’ll never please both parties 100%, but I think there’s a compromise to be had).

By: Lisbeth

Lisbeth — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 17:29:30 +0000

I do hope that this article gets the attention it deserves – I only dip in and out of WordPress and CSS so to a certain extent I blamed myself but man, I counted the number of occurrences of !important in the main stylesheet of two premium theme vendors at the weekend: 32 and 26 respectively!

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:48:37 +0000

I agree as most of the themed sites we do for clients with limited budgets need to be edited on some way or another to make them do as the client wishes. Sometimes it’s even difficult to find the correct stylesheet file to edit!

By: Jesse

Jesse — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:33:54 +0000

I love your use of Lobster. I typically use it for huge headings, but looks awesome here.