First off, I’d like to start by thanking @Srebalaji for hunting us!
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, product and startups over the years and 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 demos; mind you only themeforest has 8000 themes only for wordpress. One can do probably 20-30 trials before giving up and picking up the most common ones.
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 for both mobile and desktop to quickly browse through. Today we have 936 Themes, 14548 pages indexed, and total of 16443 screenshots on the platform.
Please take a look and let us know how we can improve the platform, and join the discussion.
Example (super) theme with many sub-themes/demos: https://www.bestofthemes.com/the...
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@danialtz@srebalaji Creative way of displaying the theme with all its screenshots and how it looks in mobile ... Really well-done (Y)
@engmsaleh Thank you Mohamed! we designed the product in such a way that we ourselves could use it everyday heavily. The side effect then was that our friends loved it too, and pushed us to make it a full-fledged product so they could use it as well. Hence, we did lots of UI/UX adaptations and asked people to try them. The outcome is what you see today. Still far from perfection though.
@danialtz loving this ! It's soo much easier than going thru pages and pages of themes and new tabs ! You've cut my search time in half! Thanks!
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Impressive usability features. Back then this service was dedicated to Joomla CMS only. I'm glad they decided to broaden their scope and share Best of Themes awesomeness with all platforms. This one has a long history and I had the privilege of working with both of the founders before. Keep up good work gents!
HI @sinanata, glad to see you around again! This is one of those projects that you have the first commit x years ago and then not much in between. Still, the most important is that the v1 is delivered.
To elaborate why it took so long time: we had real technical challenge of having high quality screenshots of internal pages of a platform at scale, both processing power and storage, and user experience limitations of browsing themes quickly but yet having a chance to look in detail on fly. One cannot take screenshots of 100 themes a day manually, period. But at the same time you cannot also browse all the pages of a theme and take automatic screenshots; you spend much more time fixing the errors than adding a few, since each theme structure is different (e.g. commerce demos with thousands of inner links vs a portfolio page). So, we had to employ state-of-the-art Machine Learning models to curate the themes, and a distributed system to handle all the image data and processing.
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@danialtz sums up to value added service, congratz.
Aliyar, Danial, This idea is brilliant. Having been on Themeforest since it conception I have seen the pro's and con's of their catalog as its grown. As a buyer both for clients and my own projects the idea of the "live preview" is time consuming and something that I spend at least 12 - 25 minutes on each morning. Having a tool like this is powerful and I am excited to see how you intend to grow this database. Is there a place to request themes or theme authors? The ones I follow are TommusRhodus, Medium_Rare, FuelThemes, KozyonThemes (brand new, brilliant designer), BoldThemes, Beautheme, Themelovin, ThemeMountain. You can tell this problem your solving is a big one for me ;) You guys rock!
@tayler2412 you are exactly our main target group. Everything you said is what we designed the product for. Stay tuned since soon we will have our second part of the product launched which will make it even easier to work with your clients. This is happening quite soon. For the themes just send an email to support@best....com; we will probably add something like producthunt user requests to the platform next.
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Is the screenshot collected by program or human? Just curious how can you take so much high quality screenshots. Nice done!
@uchengwang Mostly automatic, partly with human intervention. We could have not taken 17000 screenshots manually, and every month update them so if there are some new updates to a theme you have the latest version. I have mentioned above how we do it using mostly artificial intelligence and partly human supervision.
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