Self-made HTML5/CSS3 template. Looking for feedback, please.

Honestly man,

I like it a lot, and in my opinion you did a very good job! Also, it is responsive and everything is nicely collaborated.

I have no idea why would it be rejected... anyone else?

They are changing there criteria for themes so check up on the latest terms and conditions. If not can't you ask them to at least tell you why? Seems a bit crappy customer service otherwise.

Thanks for the kind words, Robert, it's encouraging.

Suleiman, the terms have changed just for the themes. I only have a site template, so it shouldn't be that big of a deal. I've asked the reviewer at least to sum his decision up in one sentence, but still got a canned reply:

The overall quality of your submission does not meet our aesthetic and technical requirements and will need to be improved before being resubmitted. Unfortunately we’re not able to provide more specific feedback for your submission at this time. Please consider taking some time to familiarise yourself with our current library and quality levels of popular items before resubmitting.

I am quite disappointed about their customer service, but I also don't consider quitting an option yet - not after so much work.

Emanuel,

You learned all that at Treehouse? Great job!

I don't know why they rejected this theme. It's responsive and visually appealing. Maybe you can sell it on your personal site or submit to another theme seller. I'm sure they will accept your submission eventually if you keep up the great work on creating new modern themes.

Hi Emanuel,

First off, kudos to you for throwing yourself into a competitive situation such as templates!

Overall, I like it. It's crisp and seems to behave well. My only thought is maybe it needs to be "tightened up" a bit. Some of your nice looking elements look a little "large." Does that make sense?

Then again, if bold is what you're going for then who cares what I think :-)

First of all, you should be proud! This is a very fleshed out and well polished template. There are a few things that I think could be improved upon.

1. Some of the animations are a little slow. It makes it feel laggy and takes away from the smooth feeling that transitions and animation are supposed to provide the user. Specifically, the section for our specialities. The in-out loop that it does feels really slow and honestly, maybe just having scale larger on hover would be a better solution? The constant pulsing is pretty distracting and could be a problem if the user is trying to focus on that specific element and read the content.

2. The home page is pretty full. There just seems to be a lot of information on that single page. Maybe it could be broken up into smaller chunks to seem less cluttered.

Overall, it's great! It definitely has a lot of the typical elements that templates on Theme Forest usually have. I think you did a great job and should definitely not give up.

Visually your template is on par with themes I have checked out on Themeforest. That said however, I do not think you need to animate everything. There is a lot going on in some of your pages (like the home page) and it is causing some areas to feel "laggy". Also no one has mentioned that perhaps the reason your theme was not accepted has more to do with the underlying code, than the visual style. (If you haven't already) I would do W3 checks on your source, ensure that you are adhering to current "best practices", and check compatibility with older browsers. Any time I have purchased anything the code has been very clean, well documented, and backwards compatible to at least IE8.

Thanks again for the feedback folks! :-)

I took a little time off to get a fresh view and I have to agree with most suggestions. I'm already back at work and changed a few stuff. It's a huge challenge to build a feature-rich template, but keep it simple at the same time.

As Evan already said, I think one of the main reasons why I got rejected was the zombie browser support. I've installed a Windows XP virtual machine with IE8 and the template looked quite messed up. I've been working 3 days just to fix the IE8 compatibility. Now I totally understand why all developers hate IE so much! As an ex IE user and fan, now I wish this browser would die!

I'll be back in a few days with a preview.

It's almost done! The template is now fully IE8+ compatible, I've changed the colors, migrated to Bootstrap 3, removed the excessive animations, and improved the sidebars, footer and some other elements.

Now I just need to add a few more pages (blog posts, portfolio items, about us page, etc.) and some alternative headers to give the users more options.

What do you think of these changes so far? I plan to re-submit the template tomorrow.

PREVIEW: http://dev.vibergy.com/elvado/index.html

I like what you have done to the template. I noticed a couple things though:

1. The page (at least in Chrome) has a bit of horizontal content overflow around 770px browser width on any pages with breadcrumb navigation in the header. Perhaps add some padding to those elements or using overflow-x: hidden on the body.
2. There is a 404 error for a "jquery-1.10.2.min.map" file on every page
3. You load all of your js files on everypage, perhaps only load the ones you need to help with page load times and performance
4. On the main landing page, when the navigation is not fixed, there is a white bar with a inset drop shadow that remains fixed across the top of the page and flows over the slider as you scroll down. Not really sure what is causing it.
5. This is a semantics thing, but I would be careful using the term responsive for your template because technically it is only responsive below 768px window widths, above that it is adaptive.

Hope this helps. Good luck with your submission!

Thanks for taking your time to test all this stuff and for the kind words, Evan! :-)

Everything you've mentioned is now fixed (thus the delay). I'll try my luck tomorrow morning and let you guys know how it went.

Unfortunately, the template got hard rejected again without any concrete explanation (same as before). I'm starting to seriously have doubts about my skills...

If someone has any suggestions, I'd be glad to hear them. Otherwise, I think I'll cut my losses and move on. I'll either start a new template from scratch, or start knocking on doors again for traditional web design.

Here's the preview link again: http://dev.vibergy.com/elvado/

Thanks!

I like the changes you have made to Elvado since I last saw it. Don't give up. Or at least find a client and use your theme for their site.

Did you end up accepted on TF? I remember hitting the hard reject phase with a lot of doubts on my first template.

My next three got approved on the first try!

Don't give up, if you're still fighting!