This week on WPwatercooler we’ll be discussing purchasing WordPress themes and plugins from 3rd party marketplaces.
Show airs June 16 at 11am PDT / 2pm EDT / 7PM UTC
[LISTATTENDEES event_identifier=”ep146-purchasing-3rd-party-wordpress-themes-and-plugins-5-55b59fba03d49″ show_gravatar=”true”]
The WP Community Collective supports and funds individual contribution and community-based initiatives for the open-source WordPress project. WPwatercooler are supporters of WPCC and you should be too!
Great show!
I also (and I guess everyone does) have a ‘big ass’ Envato folder full of themes and plugins that didn’t match their expectations. However, with a return policy the price of themes & plugins would have to probably double to be profitable. I’m told that some developers test ‘nulled’ versions (on sandbox wordpress installs) before buying the genuine version. Also not a health solution.
I have never heard so much misinformation on WordPress themes and plugins at Envato.com. I agree there are some bad products but you can’t say all the products are bad. Avada and Visual Composer the two biggest selling products for WordPress were criticized. Seems like they have little experience with these products and spread a lot of misinformation. The host did his best to make the argument for good products. Interesting…
I have had really bad experiences with purchased themes as well. We had a client that chose a theme from Template Monster. It was a Cherry framework based theme. I was working with a developer that the client used in the past. The problems are many – from poor documentation to very sluggish performance. Theme vendors are really giving WordPress a bad name in the (available) infrastructure methodologies market place. I am not sure how to solve this problem but I think that if (as mentioned on the podcast) a sandbox version of the theme with a list of all components that are dragged into the theme would also be a great start. Finally – support has also been somewhat unpredictable. No one expects a robust, instantaneous response but when the support is provided it is somewhat difficult to deal with people that are handling multiple calls simultaneously or off hours to the local request for support. The best story I have is that “someone” from Template Monster was requesting Admin login rights to a client site to answer questions about how the search functions were implemented in the site. I am sure that there are hundreds of similar stories for all of the template/theme shops out there but again, it is creating a negative market positioning for WordPress that helps to move potential customers to less difficult alternatives.
Leave a Reply