Posts by Siiimple

1. RECOMMENDED: TEMPLATEPATH was found in the file index.php. Use get_template_directory() instead.

2. The WordPress theme should make use of the following inbuilt functions to validate or santize content on input or escape any questionable content for put. http://codex.wordpress.org/Data_Validation

Anps said
We actually got a direct threat if do not help him with adding some additional stuff, this person stated that our rate and comments will directly depend on this issue lol

This isn’t uncommon. Some buyers use it as leverage for re-design or customization. I’ve noticed it occurs mostly with buyers who are developers or designers for a particular company. They contract a design from their client, purchase a theme, use the theme author to provide any additional customization or alteration or “fix”, and either directly or indirectly threaten the theme author with poor ratings or reviews. It’s a racket. The only way to handle it is with kindness and professionalism. Always be professional and always be polite, even with the most egregiously rude buyer.

sevenspark said
Hey Shorti,

Congrats on your success, it’s great to see your enthusiasm

Like others have said, the problem with your free customizations is that it simply isn’t scalable. Once you become very successful like Ruben (and I hope you do!), you’ll understand – with thousands of customers, and dozens of support requests a day, it simply isn’t humanly possible to provide customization for every customer.

Is that a problem? Perhaps. I think most good authors start out this way, because we all want to give our customers the best experience possible, so we go above and beyond. The issue is that you’re setting a precedent. You can decide whether setting that precedent for others (as Ruben suggested) is your problem or not – but don’t forget you’re setting it for yourself, too Once you’re selling thousands of items a month and can’t possibly handle the load for even basic customizations, what do you tell the customers who have purchased from you because you offer free customizations? Make sure your business model is scalable and sustainable.

Anyway, I definitely don’t want to discourage you, as you certainly have the right attitude, and that’s great. But suggesting that all authors should provide customizations all the time is a perspective that comes being new to this market. And that’s totally fine – but just try to understand where elite authors like Ruben are coming from.

Good luck to you!

Exactly, well stated. There is a certain idealism that exists when starting out, experiencing some success, even some good luck along the way. I’m an idealist as well. But in time, and with more experience, it will become obvious – perhaps painfully – that it’s not practical to offer free customizations in order to receive (or maybe not receive) a rating that you, at the end of the day, have no control over – or – any information on whatsoever.

You’re chasing something that you really have no control over. You don’t know who rated you, how they rated you, or if your free service ultimately did pay off with a positive rating. You only assume that it will and hope that it does. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s a losing battle – in the end.

I think you have the right idea, but there are some obstacles you may not be considering. The most obvious is that the more products you have available, the more difficult it is to offer “free customizations” – or, for that matter, paid customizations. And very often (more often than not, perhaps) there is no such thing as a single customization. Where do you cut it off? 1? 2? 5 customizations? Certain buyers (obviously not all) will take you for a ride if you are willing to offer personal, free customizations. It’s a very slippery slope. More importantly, your time a developer/designer is very valuable. Customizations cut into that development process. You want to support your items – be professional, certainly – but you eventually will have to come to grips with the fact that you can’t be everything to every one. It’s part of the business, I guess.

Of course, there are other issues you may not have run into. For instance, you will eventually encounter some buyers that are not so honest (hard to believe, I know…). They will hold your rating against you – meaning, they will ask for that free customization and if they don’t get it, they will threaten to rate you poorly. Some buyers know what they can do to manipulate the rating system – and some buyers have no qualms doing that. You have to take a firm stance and sometimes it’s not to the benefit of your rating.

Otherwise, fine tuning, responding professionally and timely – those are certainly great pieces of advice – and will benefit your rating, no doubt, especially in the long run.

There’s only so many support tickets that a seller can get to on a daily basis. I would imagine that there are many requests from many buyers, some take more time to handle than others, but most all require a reasonable amount of time – and because of that – some tickets take longer to be addressed than others.

But I’ve noticed a few trends from certain buyers, many from “design studios”, who take advantage of the seller – demand support, threaten poor ratings, and essentially push the brunt of their contract work onto the theme developer. They buy the theme, use the theme seller as their unpaid employee to get to their site fully up and running for their client. I’m not suggesting that is what you’re doing – I’m certain you’re not. But I can just say that there are many reasons sellers may choose not to offer full support 24/7 support for every item they sell.

At the end of the day, it’s a fairly inexpensive item. Many of these themes are exceptionally complicated – yet perfectly affordable and accessible. Truly, having full support for a $45 theme is really a tremendous benefit and probably worth 10x what the theme itself costs.

KingDog said
Remember you need to unzip the Tim Tams first and then upload the contents inside. Typically you’ll want to upload them directly to your hips. Hope that helps!

Urgent! Installation failed. Missing style.css. I’m requesting a refund – or a gym membership.

...my wife ate all of the TimTams. Those things are amazing. I had no idea.

Happy new year!

SyamilMJ said
What were you using to build your themes before? I’ve used Starkers to build custom websites from ground up, and it’s really good for that purpose. However it’ll be too much work to build it into a custom framework for commercial themes. Better to just start from scratch.

I was just experimenting with the idea of using a different framework. I generally work with a framework I’ve built, using the Skeleton grid framework for the baseline. But I try to experiment with different approaches after each theme is done.

Checking out Starkers for a solid starting framework – it doesn’t strike me as a particularly “bare bones” template, and wondered if anyone had experience working with it. Running a check in Theme Check on a clean installation shows dozens of REQUIRED notices and WARNINGS. Doesn’t seem like a great starting point to build out a independent framework when you have to immediately address a bunch of issues from the start.

ha, ha

I always have to question whether I’ve done something ridiculous like the ‘missing stylesheet error’. it’s always possible