Falling out of love…
With the concept of Control Panel templates for WordPress (ie. most of the templates on themeforest.net).
I used to love them because they allowed people to have really neat looking websites without having to know anything about coding.
99% of the time though, people don’t want all the customization they provide…and they DO want to customize something the cpanel doesn’t cover. I let 40 bucks fall by the wayside today trying to customize a themeforest template to mimic their demo version…it was a nightmare.
It was on the too many options side of the themeforest spectrum…there were literally 200+ different customization options…and they weren’t clear about what does what. Also their “preset” options weren’t really presets…they were more like design options for the theme that only the author knew how to set up (when people asked how to make it look like the demo, she asked for people’s account information to set it up for them instead of documenting the processes).
Know what I’m going to do? Make my own…to mimic what their demo website was. That way, it will just work the way I want and customizing further would be straightfoward.
For now, this out the box WordPress Template will do.
I was tired of looking at the old one.
Dear WordPress theme makers…simple is better. If you MUST include customization, design your templates in a way that can be easily skinned.
Not easily skinned for another designer or for people who think like you, but easily skinned for a newb.
I’m talking preset color schemes/upload logo/upload header/ done easy.
Thanks.
