Rejected

"I think all great innovations are built on rejections.”
Louise Nevelson

Over the past two weeks I’ve spent several hours of preparing, coding, testing and documenting a WordPress theme that I submitted to the web templates marketplace Theme Forest. I spent most of last night doing all the prep work for submitting the theme and its required documentation. Around 2am I finally got the theme submitted. And by the time I got back from lunch the same day, it was rejected.

After reading the e-mail I had a few different emotions running through. I was disappointed, naturally. I felt like my past few weeks of work were a complete waste and I should have just gone to sleep earlier and saved myself the trouble.

I was a bit confused by the rejection. I examined other WordPress themes for sale before I even began working on mine to see the quality of themes that were approved. While I knew my theme wasn’t earth shattering by any means, I felt that it added a few nice things that the others were lacking.  Some of the approved themes had spelling errors and a few looked like something I could reproduce in under 5 hours. So I began working with confidence that my theme would at least get approved, it might not be an all-time best seller, but approval was my goal.

As the initial negative feelings started to subside I recalled of a portion of a book I’m currently reading. In Stephen King’s On Writing he recalls submitting his fiction stories to various publications as he was growing up. An overwhelming majority of his earlier submission were returned with rejection slips attached. He would take each slip and punch it through a nail that hung over his bed. The stack of slips got so large that he eventually had to move them to a bigger nail to hold them all. Of course now he is know as one of the most successful fiction writers ever.

Although it seems easy to just give up after the rejection and forgo trying to submit anything again, I’ve learned it’s best to reflect on what I learned from the process. Cup half full kind of thinking.

• I have my first slip to go on the nail.
• I learned that the polish of a theme takes FOREVER. I had about 99% of the theme finished within the first weekend of work. That remaining 1% took about ten times longer than the 99%.
• I learning some tricks for getting IE6 to work. This is what a majority of my hold-up was. Now I can hopefully churn through IE6 issues much quicker in the future.
• I learned how to code a custom options panel in WordPress. This is the best thing I learned from submitting a theme that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. By submitting the theme I had to try to make this theme easy for people who don’t know how to hack their php to get advanced features. So I took the time to learn this technique and I must say it’s a powerful tool to use. Although some of his code needs correcting, this tutorial is a great place to learn how to make your own.
• I now have a very polished theme framework from which to code future themes. I designed the theme with multiple css files. One controls the entire layout and others control the colors. I can now use that polished layout css and can just include a different color css file to get drastic results in the blog’s presentation.

Although the experience wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for, I do plan on submitting more themes and eventually getting an accepted e-mail. I appreciate the opportunity Theme Forest provides and especially Kailoon for taking the time to review the theme, even if it wasn’t up to aesthetic standards.

If you would like to check out my Circularize’d Wordpress theme and offer suggestions in the comments on what I could do improve to get it past the approval process it would be greatly appreciated. This page lists all of the theme’s features.