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Comment by supersan | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty good way to browse actually. My pet-peeve with sites like wrapbootstrap, etc is that you have to open each theme, click the live preview button and then click the "remove frame" icon to get the feel. Then unless you opened it in a new window, you forget where you started. Your site solves that problem. Good work!

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.

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Indeed, I was spending 15 min minimum for each theme, and then there are themes like Bridge that has 200 different style sub-themes (or demos), where each can be used actually for any website. So, who has time to go through all?

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.

I agree - this is better than most sites for browsing themes. However, I still find it hard to get a feel for a theme's style when a giant cover image makes up 90% of a screenshot for a theme. I understand that most modern themes are image-heavy (especially on the home page), and full-page thumbnails are a good way to see the high-level layout characteristics of a theme, but I'm often more on the lookout for good typography, navigational elements, icons, etc.

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.

Good point. You can click on the screenshot again for full resolution and back.

Yeah - that works. I was more thinking of something in the main list view (possibly a closeup thumbnail or two of some notable visual details) to make those details more apparent when scrolling through many themes, but the click-to-zoom/lightbox certainly fills the need in a better way than many other sites do.

Either way, the site looks really nice - good job!

We have already the possibility of intervening automated algorithms and adding custom screenshots, so if we allow theme authors to claim their themes they can add those close-ups themselves, which would be an obvious next step.

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.

Good point. I'll consider removing the preview frames on WrapBootstrap. I've also grown weary of having to click twice.

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