
Show HN: Best of Themes – The simplest way to browse thousands of website themes - danialtz
https://www.bestofthemes.com
======
supersan
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.

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

~~~
dperfect
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!

~~~
danialtz
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.

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danialtz
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
What markets are you hooking into?

This is really pretty by the way.

~~~
danialtz
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.

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WA
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
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.

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philfreo
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
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.

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usaphp
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
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
> "mind you TF adds 80 per day, so we are picky for now)"

TF adds only a handful of new Wordpress themes per day.

~~~
danialtz
Yes. When we were doing pre-project work we looked at the growth statistics of
all the marketplaces, what kind of themes gets downloaded, if there is
pattern, and which prices are they likely to succeed. There, of course, you
see the number of new themes added, update frequency and popularity as a side-
effect. Overall, in whole eco-system there are around up to 200 themes added
daily for various platforms when we did the study, with TF pushing the most
out for wordpress.

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smoyer
"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
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
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
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
I think a killer feature on the ecommerce side would be conversion rate.

~~~
danialtz
can you elaborate?

~~~
nedwin
The conversion rates from someone visiting your site to making a purchase of
whatever product you're selling is incredibly important in terms of revenue.
You've already spent money getting the person to your site, you just need to
close the deal.

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.

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mohsinr
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
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.

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

~~~
danialtz
Thank you! we removed it for the next release.

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philfrasty
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
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.

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cyanbane
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
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?

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coisnepe
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
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.

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zupa-hu
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
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.

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joshmn
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.

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

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

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

