ThemeForest is an integral part of a
company that is based on the idea of a global community called Envato. It
started in 2006 in Australia as a single marketplace, with a moto of enabling
creative and technical people to earn a living doing what they love frm all
over the world, and now it has grown into an ecosystem or collection of
different marketplace under one community. Collis and Cyan Ta’eed, who are
husband and wife as well, co-founded the company, and Collis is the CEO of the
company with his wife being the Director. They launched FlashDen as their first
product, and then later on launched FreelanceSwitch and Psdtuts+ to teach
freelancing and photoshop online. And then gradually they expanded their
marketplace and officially launched the whole thing under the brand Envato,
with an office setup in Melbourne in 2009. Then in 2014, Envato Market was launched
as a single brand with more than 1 million active buyers and eight different
marketplaces under one umbrella focusing on providing the best experience.
Themeforest is now one of the largest
online digital marketplaces for themes and templates for different platforms
and technologies like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Shopify, MailChimp, Magento,
Bootstrap, HTML5, HTML, email templates, Marketing, PSD, Layers WP, Jekyll,
eCommerce, Ghost, Muse, Blogging, Tumblr, forums, typeEngine, sketch, facebook
templates and more. It currently has more than 20,000 different themes and
templates to offer in various categories and genres. Since you can’t go through
everything with such a big number, the site is designed to offer the user the
option of direct search or filter through categories or sort the search results
based on popularity, being latest, authors, reviews, etc. to make it easy for
you to find what you want.
Themes and Features
As we already know there are thousands of
themes on this marketplace serving frm a simple static mailer or email
template to a highly customizable responsive WordPress themes to a standalone
flexible CMS as well. The different kinds of themes which ThemeForest cater to
multiple kinds of requirements under diverse domains and fields like business,
corporate, food, blog, online magazine, product based company, retail,
directory, mobile, real estate, wedding, nonprofit, education, entertainment,
personal, admin backend and much more.
Few of the top selling WP themes and
templates are Avada, X theme, enfold, bridge, beTheme, Jupiter, Salient, Avant,
Newspaper, Brooklyn, The7, flatsome, Buildpress, Porto, Studio8, Ronneby,
Oshine, Kalium, Total, Sahifa, Kallyas and so many more to add to this list.
All of these themes on their showcase so many awesome features and latest
technologies like responsive design, SEO optimized, video tutorials,
documentations, visual composer, featured plugins, APIs, wiki, drag and drop,
font icons, form builder, multiple fonts, etc. A lot of the premium themes have some plugins or fonts that are paid as a free add-on if you buy the
theme, which makes the user more interested in buying a certain theme. Like
GoodLayers is a custom plugin available for free with any theme you buy frm
the “Good Layers” store on Theme Forest.
You wouldn’t be surprised to see the
subcategories under each primary categorization of themes on this site based on
the niche requirements as well as the niche topic as well. For example, there
are specific themes or templates just to make a landing page of a website or
just a login page for a website. Themes can also be filtered based on the type
of requirements a customer may have like a dashboard, an admin panel, an online
directory or listing, a portfolio or online resume site, or a blogger website
or a coming soon page or an app landing page or an LMS and similar demands like
this with various different styles and interactions like parallax, flat design,
prominently images based, photography gallery layout, one page layout, infographics
and many more.
Templates are also divided based on popular
Frameworks like Bootstrap 3, Genesis framework, AngularJS and CMSs like
opencart, Concrete5, uber cart, woo commerce, zen cart, virtual mart, zend,
etc.
The pricing of the themes are based on the
platform it is made for and the quality of the code, theme features it has,
customer base and who is the author of the theme. Each of the themes can range
frm as low as $20 to as high as $85. There is no special offer or an
alternative way to buy any theme other than just pay the price for the theme,
and if you have a purchase code or a discount coupon, then you can save quite a
lot on it. Few of the themes become featured based on some premium
functionalities or for being the most downloaded or popular. Some themes or
digital products are also made available for free as “free downloads” or
“freebies”, selected on the basis of reviews and market performance. Each and
every theme or template is a copyright of its owner or author who publishes it
on the marketplace. Developers and designers can use the themes for their
projects or personal use, but they can’t add their name to the footer saying
that the site was designed by them or created by them. This requires a
different kind of license which enables the user buying the theme the full
right to do whatever the user wants and take credit for the work as well, even
if the theme is made by someone else. Like for example Studiopress is one of
the sites that provide 100% GPL. Even though the user may think that they have
customized the theme after buying it and changed a few things in it for their
project, it is recommended for the user to ask the original author for
permission to add the credit link at the bottom.
Each theme has a detailed page on the
marketplace where you would see the screenshots of the theme with a dedicated
comments section that the users may use to ask questions or share feedback on
the respective theme. The page will have the full list of technical and
functional features and showcase all the major wow factors and greatness that
theme provides to the customers. It also provides the tags for each theme to
make it easier to understand the relevancy and the use of the theme, like
responsive, PHP, PSD, widget ready, squares, tiles, portfolio, black and white,
agency, company, etc. Now words or tags like these explain a lot about the
theme and its use and intent. Each theme can commonly be bought with two
license options “regular” and “extended”, for details you will have to visit their
site since the license details may change anytime.
As the designers and developers make money
by creating, publishing and selling their themes here, other users can always
become an affiliate partner to the marketplace and help sell the same themes
for them and earn some commission money out of that, which is like a win-win
situation for all of them.
Contact and Support
ThemeForest has a 24 x 7 customer support,
and the support is not separate for just Themeforest, it is for all the sites
under the “envato market”. If you need specific support or assistance on the
themes and its features, then the user needs to connect with developer or
author of the theme directly.
Each theme page itself has a separate
support section on the site which provides the details for the users as to
where they can get the technical support frm the development or support team
of the author who have developed and published the theme on ThemeForest. It can
be either a forum, discussion board, simple contact forms, ticketing system,
FAQ section or knowledge base.
Since envato market is a collection of many
sites including themeforest therefore majorly most of the social media pages
are with the brand name of “envato”, like for example their Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/envato.
But still to mention as an exception for Twitter, the link is specific https://twitter.com/themeforest
A little more on their contact details are
given below
Address: 121
King St, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia
Emails: [email protected],
[email protected]