Marketplace update: improved design & loading time of Themesberg, new partnerships and a roadmap for future features
I hope this article finds you in good shape and health in the midst of this crisis. We’re all getting affected by the pandemic in terms of mental health and productivity. Although web developers and programmers are getting less affected in terms of work, it is still taking a toll on all of us.
I wanted to write this article to give you some insight on the current status of Themesberg and what you should expect from this marketplace in the next few months. Currently we are one developer and designer working full time in creating products, writing blog posts and improving the website.
Last month we hit an important milestone, namely achieving more than 1000 downloads on two of our free themes: Pixel Lite Bootstrap UI Kit and Windows 95 UI Kit. We also launched Rocket, a premium Bootstrap template for Software as a Service type of online businesses. Additionally Pixel Lite’s official public Github repository also hit over 200 stars in a matter of a few weeks!
A lot of positive advancements have been happening the last couple of months and I’m happy to announce that we will be even more focused on creating high quality themes, updating the features of this website and offering helpful blog articles.
Let me start about giving you some updates on what happened and will happen for Themesberg in the next couple of months.
A faster and better looking version of Themesberg
The website is officially launched since June last year, but we as a team have improved in terms of providing better design and performance. So we decided to give a bit of a facelift to the main website. If you’ve been visiting Themesberg regularly, perhaps you noticed a slight improvement in terms of UI and speed. Here’s why:
Optimized images, scripts and stylesheets
We know time is precious so we removed all excess scripts and styles to increase the speed of loading time. Additionally, most images are now being lazy loaded, so you will see certain content load much faster than before. According to Google Analytics, we successfully reduced the average loading time by 33%. We may even write a tutorial article on how to do this on your website!
Better and more accessible design ??
In the past couple of months we started to focus a lot more on accessibility and we realized that there were quite a few elements on our website that did not pass the AA grade of WCAG accessibility.
Coloring and sizing for typography and components are now much better in terms of readability and we also facelifted certain pages, such as the product page and the way we present the pricing table.
There will be more to come as we will expand the number of pages and features the website has to offer.
Upcoming updates for the website ?
We’re already planning out the new features Themesberg will have. Expect big improvements for your personal dashboard, such as: a much better overview of the downloaded items, personalized mailing system for product updates and discounts and the possibility of adding multiple items in a cart before checkout.
We recently finished refactoring the back-end of Themesberg so adding new features will be a bit easier to do so. If you have suggestions, please do let us know in the comment section or even contact us and I will personally get back to you.
New partnership with Creative Tim ❤️
Creative Tim is one of the most well known and respected startups globally to offer high quality UI Kits and admin dashboards in various technologies such as Bootstrap, React, Vue, Angular and so on. They are awesome and hard working guys and I’m happy to announce that we will be having a long term collaboration with them.
We already have launched Impact Design System and Impact Design System PRO bringing together the best of two worlds: front presentational pages and advanced admin dashboards. We worked roughly 2 months on this product and based on early feedback it seems it will be a bestseller. The PRO version contains more than 45 example pages and 1600 hand-crafted Bootstrap elements.
We will later write an article on how we created Impact and the way you can use it to improve your online business.
Partnership with AppSeed ??
Last week I had a great video call with Adi from AppSeed. Basically what they do is they automatize as much as they can with boilerplate code. I couldn’t believe when he told me that it would take him only a couple of minutes to create a basic version of Windows 95 UI Kit or Pixel Lite in Flask.
Of course not everything was done with the convertor, but much of the tasks have been done automatically. This is really a game changer and we will be collaborating with them from now on.
With that being said they already have created a version of Windows 95 in Flask with a fully functional login/registration system in Flask. Pretty neat. You can find Windows 95 UI Kit in Flask here on AppSeed’s website.
Next product to be converted in Flask will be Pixel Lite, so we’ll keep an eye out for that and let you know when it has been converted.
That’s all for now. We’re working on an update for Spaces currently and then we will start building the updates for Themesberg that I presented above. If you want to be the first to find out about news, do subscribe to our weekly newsletter!