A while ago we ran a little survey to ask you about your opinion regarding our WordPress Themes and your general experience with Elmastudio. We are so happy for all your feedback, your constructive critic and your helpful advice. Thanks to all of you, who took the time to answer our questions and give your thoughtful insights. Because of your feedback we were able to make plans on how to improve our WordPress themes and the entire website and shop experience in the upcoming weeks. In this post we want to share the most important lessons we have learned from your answers.

1. What kind of themes you are interested in?

In our survey we asked you, what kind of themes you would love to see more. Here are the results:

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Business, Portfolio and Magazine themes seem to be the most popular themes. With blog themes as a close runner-up. Of course we are implementing the results into our upcoming themes. So our next theme (which we are starting to work on from next week) will be a Business theme. Furthermore we are working on new features and design options for Uku. And we have a „surprise“ theme in the works as well.

2. Which features would you like to see in our themes?

We also asked you, which theme features you would like to have in our themes. Here are the results:

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Of course we take your answers seriously, so in the upcoming weeks we will work on ways to make it easier for you to customize the fonts in our themes. We will also publish new blog posts showing you the best way to use Google and Typekit fonts in a WordPress theme.

Our newest theme Uku already offers more customization options compared to our previous themes. We plan to further expand this trend. When we started to create WordPress themes back in 2012 we rather focused on smaller themes with less options. Our goal was it to create a greater number of smaller themes.

But in the last months, we saw that more and more users wish to see more customization options in a theme. I think users also got used to more options in general and by using the WordPress customizer with its preview mode it also got a lot easier to customize a theme and see the result right away. Therefore we will be working on somehow „bigger“ themes in the upcoming months. Themes with more options to create an individual WordPress website in an easy and user-friendly way. We will step by step also add more features like eCommerce support, a portfolio option or more page templates to our themes.

Another big step we are currently working on are optional automatic theme updates directly in the WordPress dashboard. Since we are looking for an easy to use, stable system for all our existing themes, we are still working on the best approach to take. But it will not be too long, until we will be updating our themes to include automatic updates (with the option to deactivate the setting in the customizer).

3. Which blog topic would you like to read more about?

We also asked you, what you would like to read on our Elmastudio blog and which topics would interest you most. Most of you are interested to learn more about WordPress plugins, see more tutorials for advanced WordPress users, design inspirations, web design tips as well as inspirations for bloggers.

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4. General improvements?

In our survey we also asked you what we should improve in general. And again your answers were super helpful to us and we found the following answers the most common ones:

  • Optimize the support for Multilingual WordPress websites. Our themes work with Multilingual WordPress plugins like WPML or Polylang, but we will start to prepare our themes especially for those plugins.
  • Simplify font customizations. As I already mentioned above, we will definitely work on it.
  • Make the theme documentations easier to understand for first-time WordPress users. Yes, we will improve our documentations and add more beginners tutorials for our themes.
  • Faster release of bug fixes. Again we take your feedback very seriously and will work on improving the release time for bug fixes.
  • At last some of you mentioned our theme forum as not ideal and a little bit confusing to use or too slow in response times. We already thought about moving the forum to a better, more professional support solution for quite some time. Motivated by your feedback we tested a few forum solutions over the last weeks and we decided to move the forum to a new solution within this months. Our main goals are faster response times as well as a more user friendly platform for you.

5. Positive feedback

At last we also want to mention the amazing and very motivating positive feedback we received from you. Thank you so much for your kind words. The most outstanding feedback was definitely towards our minimal theme design. The words clarity, timelessness, good typography, minimalism and simplicity were mentioned a lot. You also like our clean theme code and our friendly prices.

Summing up

We are super thankful for everyone of you, who took the time out of their day to help us improve our work. It was heartwarming and super helpful at the same time to read your feedback. We will work on the mentioned improvements in the upcoming weeks and let you know about any changes here on the blog and in our newsletter. If you have additional feedback that was not mentioned yet, please write us a comment below. We love to hear from you.