Show HN: Best of Themes – The simplest way to browse thousands of website themes
bestofthemes.com
bestofthemes.com
P.S. To make browsing even faster, maybe you can add up down arrows in the lightbox too, so that I can move on to the next theme and find it even faster. Just my 2c.
This is why we made it very easy to go through themes and their related sub-themes. It can be even improved further with your great arrow down idea and a modal.
Not sure about the best solution for that, but it makes me think there's probably a better way to highlight both the high-level and low-level details of a theme at a glance.
Either way, the site looks really nice - good job!
However, today this is technically challenging problem since the screenshots are not made manually, but with supervised algorithms. I dream about a day that we can pinpoint visually which area of the image are visually interesting/aesthetic to make a close-up, utilizing Neural Networks better. We need Deepmind for themes, the way google has it for their Photos.
This is really pretty by the way.
- that don't have any stupid JS/CSS animations
- that don't use web fonts or at least make me configure them easily
- that have a combined max size of all assets minus content, e. g. "JS+CSS+Icons+Images+Fonts < 200KB"
- that have a combined max amount of requests for all assets, e. g. "max 5 HTTP requests to fetch CSS, JS, Icons, Fonts"
Because I'm tired of animations, bloat and low page speed.
I know, it's impossible, but let me dream on ;)
One of those boring days I actually tried that. Since we parse every page we know what's inside, how many connections they make, and the load times before and after DOM load. basically as you listed. You could then actually filter based on that, but you know, it is a very power user feature. Maybe we do it like an "advanced filters" section that does not confuse normal users, you know, for fun.
However the fact that you only show a very small number of themes before making me click & wait till new ones load makes this not very good. You should load way more at once and consider adding infiniscroll.
From one side we have users that want to find the right theme for their new website or client, and are devastated by shear amount of new themes everyday so they tend to pick up from "the top 100 themes" all the time.
From the other point, we have theme authors that are, to our feeling, pushing their limits of getting new users onboard (e.g. TF channel saturation), and also struggle with giving users the impression of how great their themes are on these marketplaces. Discovery is a challenge.
The technical challenge of this project has been always how to manage 20000+ links, have their screenshot taken for different screen-sizes, understand what is inside, store the very large amount of image content on distributed systems, annotate the screenshots and themes, and make it damn easy to search for users. This we have achieved this through large amount of automation on our micro-services, machine-learning and supervision of our team. Today we can add up to 50 themes per day with our current resources (mind you TF adds 80 per day, so we are picky for now). Updating would be the extension of this process, so instead of adding new we reindex the old.
Overall, we are very happy that theme authors like this project as well and feel that it fills a new era of theme distribution. We will definitely empower them with their own content once our traction is enough for them to jump onboard. This is happening quite a bit faster than we thought. Top authors on TF are already contacting us to claim their themes and sending us suggestions how to improve the platform even further. This is a bit scary :)
TF adds only a handful of new Wordpress themes per day.
Great literary reference but I think you're also providing a service if you tell the world which themes to avoid. Rotten Tomatoes is popular due to their brutal honesty as well as their accuracy. And sometimes a beautiful theme has real implementation problems that aren't visually obvious.
- Bugs or lack of them
- Performance (you've been to those dog slow sites)
- Security issues (a category of bugs worth their own line)
- Dependencies - a 200kB theme really isn't 200kB if it requires 20 Javascript and CSS files packing another 4MB on.
- Known use - there's a sweet spot since you don't want to be the only one using a theme. You also don't want 90% of the other sites on the Internet to look exactly like yours.
- Open-source versus closed-source (regardless of price)
- Community engagement
- Author responsiveness
Things like sliders or just generally poor design can have a big impact on conversions.
If you tracked usage of a range of ecommerce themes you could probably find a way to know which ones had great conversion rates and which ones didn't perform so well. So now when people are looking for a new ecommerce theme they can filter by the ones with the highest conversion rates.
I really like the way you are showing themes there with not just a thumbnail as it used to be, but with homepage and inner pages's templates.
Great work! Keep it up!
Only thing I am missing is a „quality indicator“. I buy a lot of themes on TF and I usually just sort by „best sellers“ and then look at ratings and number of comments (aka number of problems). Thinking behind this is simply: more downloads --> more feedback --> more fixes --> better product.
If you click on the title of each theme, it takes you to a detail page, where each screenshot has a link hover on top of it. Is this what you wanted? Anything else we can improve?
Keep up the good work!
Doesn't need to be Russian, obviously. I'm not interested in language support, I'm just interested in seeing something other than themeforest/wrapbootstrap/creative-tim/creativemarket/templatemonster/boxedart (still a thing?), etc.