6 ms·

Show HN: Best of Themes – The simplest way to browse thousands of website themes

164 points by danialtz 10y ago

danialtz 10y ago
Hey everyone! I'm one of the creators of BestofThemes and would love to answer any questions that you may have about it. We have created numerous projects over years and we had always the problem of finding a matching theme to our product. The current process is amazingly time consuming and consists of going to each theme provider, clicking on each theme and checking the demo; mind you only themeforest has 8000 themes for wordpress. One can do probably 20-30 checks before giving up. So, to solve our own itch we made this platform, a curated collection of free and commercial themes added daily, with a screenshot of their most important pages together with their mobile view to quickly browse through. Please take a look and let us know how we can improve the platform before going public. Many thanks!
- joshmn 10y ago
  What markets are you hooking into? This is really pretty by the way.
  - danialtz 10y ago
    Thank you! We are currently hooking into ThemeForest, WrapBootstrap, TemplateMonster and several individual free theme providers. After this beta release, we are planning to add top houses like ElegantThemes as well. One of the main points, and expensive! additions different than most of other showcase website is that we spend lot of time curating the free themes as well.
joshmn 10y ago
On the note of marketplaces, is there any Russian equivalent (or the like) to Themeforest? 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.
philfreo 10y ago
The way you display each theme is great 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.
- danialtz 10y ago
  Totally feel what you are saying Phil, and specially since we wanted to use the website ourselves we knew we had to find a better way. The problem with infinite scroll is the user RAM, which quickly fills when we add more and more themes, and becomes really sluggish. Next, we tried Google Photos style of loading but then the JS load became very high and all kind of browser quirks. So in the spirit of lean method we decided to skip perfection and make it great enough. I will increase the number of themes per page to 20 not to stress the RAM, and maybe later to 30. Please keep your comments coming since it will help us understand the way you use the website and improve it.
supersan 10y ago
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.
- danialtz 10y ago
  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.
- coderdude 10y ago
  Good point. I'll consider removing the preview frames on WrapBootstrap. I've also grown weary of having to click twice.
- dperfect 10y ago
  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.
  - danialtz 10y ago
    Good point. You can click on the screenshot again for full resolution and back.
minitech 10y ago
Suggestion: remove hover effects on the outer theme boxes. They’re not interactive, and large background colour changes are distracting.
- danialtz 10y ago
  Thank you! we removed it for the next release.
mohsinr 10y ago
You know I thought I was on Amazon site. Glad to see a website which does not look like Themes' related site :) 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!
- danialtz 10y ago
  Thank you! by the way we curate themes by hand and add tags to it, to make it searchable as well. Of course, today's release is a beta release to get feedback from the community, but afterwards we plan to add more searchable content, e.g. tags, topics etc to each individual page even. This means you will be able to search for "pricing pages" only as well.
tishawnbenin 10y ago
I love it! And it's so easy to use.
fouc 10y ago
Viewing the theme screenshots looks a bit blurry to me on a retina display (13" @ default scaling).
usaphp 10y ago
Great layout, great idea. The only problem I can see (I am Elite Theme author on TF) is that these demos are updated/changing/adding almost weekly by theme authors, and managing these 1000+ themes and 20,000+ links to demos will be incredibly hard on your part, I would recommend adding a BIG button which will make theme authors to help you curate their own themes, I am pretty sure they will be glad to do that in order to get more exposing to their items.
- danialtz 10y ago
  You have touched the point that made this project more than just another curated list of themes website built on wordpress and required a full team of top engineers and designers. 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 :)
  - usaphp 10y ago
    > "mind you TF adds 80 per day, so we are picky for now)" TF adds only a handful of new Wordpress themes per day.
coisnepe 10y ago
So refreshing to see a themes website that looks different and is way more functional. Thanks for this! I just wanted to point out that (at least for me) the filters are reset when I try to "order" by Featured, Popular or Newest. Keep up the good work!
- danialtz 10y ago
  Thank you for your feedback! Featured and Popular and Newest use different indices, so each time one is selected the filter is reseted. We'll try find a way around it in near future.
WA 10y ago
These would be killer features. Filter by themes: - 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 ;)
- danialtz 10y ago
  Funny you'd say that. I also dislike the latest trend of what we joke as *Wordpress Themes: The New Operating Systems of the Web". So bloated and so slow. 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.
philfrasty 10y ago
Looks great :) 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.
- danialtz 10y ago
  This is the default sorting on the homepage, based on sales, and some other features. Definitely needs testing and improvements to give user the best theme matching their needs. Nobody has time to crawl thousands of themes.
smoyer 10y ago
"It was the best of themes. It was the worst of themes." 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.
- danialtz 10y ago
  can you elaborate more? what do you think would be a killer feature of the platform that would make you use it each time?
  - smoyer 10y ago
    In addition to the comment about filtering by size, etc, I'm also concerned about operational features - here are a few that come to mind: - 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
    - danialtz 10y ago
      Tempting indeed, and would be a radical service: Rotten Tomato for Themes. I really like the idea, and will discuss it with the team. Can be a test for one of our sprints.
      - nedwin 10y ago
        I think a killer feature on the ecommerce side would be conversion rate.
        10y ago
zupa-hu 10y ago
Ah finally! I as going nuts browsing theme sites and wished for a long time someone would build this. Thanks danialtz! Bookmarked. People keep asking me for a theme site so I'll recommend yours from now on.
- danialtz 10y ago
  Thank you zupa-hu! We had the same problem ourselves and this was to solve our own pain points. Say, I was working on an admin backend, and then forgot where I've seen a card element. Normally, you have to go again through all the sub-pages (some have 300) to find it. Now, I open the admin theme and very quickly go through all screenshots until I find it. Or sometimes use search.
cyanbane 10y ago
Love this, would be cool also to list if there are any external links within theme by default and where those go to, also any libraries used as a dependency. Great presentation of themes though, much better than just the 1 main screen shot.
- danialtz 10y ago
  Glad you liked it! 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?
danialtz 10y ago
Currently featured on Product Hunt frontpage and rising: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/best-of-themes https://www.producthunt.com/posts/best-of-themes

164 points by danialtz 10y ago

Hey everyone! I'm one of the creators of BestofThemes and would love to answer any questions that you may have about it. We have created numerous projects over years and we had always the problem of finding a matching theme to our product. The current process is amazingly time consuming and consists of going to each theme provider, clicking on each theme and checking the demo; mind you only themeforest has 8000 themes for wordpress. One can do probably 20-30 checks before giving up. So, to solve our own itch we made this platform, a curated collection of free and commercial themes added daily, with a screenshot of their most important pages together with their mobile view to quickly browse through. Please take a look and let us know how we can improve the platform before going public. Many thanks!

joshmn 10y ago
What markets are you hooking into? This is really pretty by the way.
- danialtz 10y ago
  Thank you! We are currently hooking into ThemeForest, WrapBootstrap, TemplateMonster and several individual free theme providers. After this beta release, we are planning to add top houses like ElegantThemes as well. One of the main points, and expensive! additions different than most of other showcase website is that we spend lot of time curating the free themes as well.

joshmn 10y ago

On the note of marketplaces, is there any Russian equivalent (or the like) to Themeforest? 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.

philfreo 10y ago

The way you display each theme is great 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.

danialtz 10y ago
Totally feel what you are saying Phil, and specially since we wanted to use the website ourselves we knew we had to find a better way. The problem with infinite scroll is the user RAM, which quickly fills when we add more and more themes, and becomes really sluggish. Next, we tried Google Photos style of loading but then the JS load became very high and all kind of browser quirks. So in the spirit of lean method we decided to skip perfection and make it great enough. I will increase the number of themes per page to 20 not to stress the RAM, and maybe later to 30. Please keep your comments coming since it will help us understand the way you use the website and improve it.

supersan 10y ago

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.

danialtz 10y ago
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.
coderdude 10y ago
Good point. I'll consider removing the preview frames on WrapBootstrap. I've also grown weary of having to click twice.
dperfect 10y ago
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.
- danialtz 10y ago
  Good point. You can click on the screenshot again for full resolution and back.

minitech 10y ago

Suggestion: remove hover effects on the outer theme boxes. They’re not interactive, and large background colour changes are distracting.

danialtz 10y ago
Thank you! we removed it for the next release.

mohsinr 10y ago

You know I thought I was on Amazon site. Glad to see a website which does not look like Themes' related site :) 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!

danialtz 10y ago
Thank you! by the way we curate themes by hand and add tags to it, to make it searchable as well. Of course, today's release is a beta release to get feedback from the community, but afterwards we plan to add more searchable content, e.g. tags, topics etc to each individual page even. This means you will be able to search for "pricing pages" only as well.

tishawnbenin 10y ago

I love it! And it's so easy to use.

fouc 10y ago

Viewing the theme screenshots looks a bit blurry to me on a retina display (13" @ default scaling).

usaphp 10y ago

Great layout, great idea. The only problem I can see (I am Elite Theme author on TF) is that these demos are updated/changing/adding almost weekly by theme authors, and managing these 1000+ themes and 20,000+ links to demos will be incredibly hard on your part, I would recommend adding a BIG button which will make theme authors to help you curate their own themes, I am pretty sure they will be glad to do that in order to get more exposing to their items.

danialtz 10y ago
You have touched the point that made this project more than just another curated list of themes website built on wordpress and required a full team of top engineers and designers. 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 :)
- usaphp 10y ago
  > "mind you TF adds 80 per day, so we are picky for now)" TF adds only a handful of new Wordpress themes per day.

coisnepe 10y ago

So refreshing to see a themes website that looks different and is way more functional. Thanks for this! I just wanted to point out that (at least for me) the filters are reset when I try to "order" by Featured, Popular or Newest. Keep up the good work!

danialtz 10y ago
Thank you for your feedback! Featured and Popular and Newest use different indices, so each time one is selected the filter is reseted. We'll try find a way around it in near future.

WA 10y ago

These would be killer features. Filter by themes: - 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 ;)

danialtz 10y ago
Funny you'd say that. I also dislike the latest trend of what we joke as *Wordpress Themes: The New Operating Systems of the Web". So bloated and so slow. 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.

philfrasty 10y ago

Looks great :) 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.

danialtz 10y ago
This is the default sorting on the homepage, based on sales, and some other features. Definitely needs testing and improvements to give user the best theme matching their needs. Nobody has time to crawl thousands of themes.

smoyer 10y ago

"It was the best of themes. It was the worst of themes." 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.

danialtz 10y ago
can you elaborate more? what do you think would be a killer feature of the platform that would make you use it each time?
- smoyer 10y ago
  In addition to the comment about filtering by size, etc, I'm also concerned about operational features - here are a few that come to mind: - 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
  - danialtz 10y ago
    Tempting indeed, and would be a radical service: Rotten Tomato for Themes. I really like the idea, and will discuss it with the team. Can be a test for one of our sprints.
    - nedwin 10y ago
      I think a killer feature on the ecommerce side would be conversion rate.
      - 10y ago

zupa-hu 10y ago

Ah finally! I as going nuts browsing theme sites and wished for a long time someone would build this. Thanks danialtz! Bookmarked. People keep asking me for a theme site so I'll recommend yours from now on.

danialtz 10y ago
Thank you zupa-hu! We had the same problem ourselves and this was to solve our own pain points. Say, I was working on an admin backend, and then forgot where I've seen a card element. Normally, you have to go again through all the sub-pages (some have 300) to find it. Now, I open the admin theme and very quickly go through all screenshots until I find it. Or sometimes use search.

cyanbane 10y ago

Love this, would be cool also to list if there are any external links within theme by default and where those go to, also any libraries used as a dependency. Great presentation of themes though, much better than just the 1 main screen shot.

danialtz 10y ago
Glad you liked it! 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?

danialtz 10y ago

Currently featured on Product Hunt frontpage and rising: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/best-of-themes https://www.producthunt.com/posts/best-of-themes