Hello there, fellow developers! Today, I’m going to share a real story about how I used ThemeForest to speed up my front-end development process.
The Beginning
As a full-stack developer, I’ve always been on the lookout for frameworks, tools and resources that can make my work easier and more efficient. One day, a colleague sent me a multi-purpose template the team has bought from ThemeForest. What a beautiful theme, I said. For those who aren’t familiar, ThemeForest is a marketplace for designers and developers to sell and buy themes. It’s like a treasure trove of ready-made themes that you can customize to suit your needs.
The Experiment
Intrigued by the potential of ThemeForest, I decided to give it a shot. I purchased a theme that closely matched the design requirements of my project. The theme came with a plethora of pre-designed components, which saved me a lot of time that I would have otherwise spent coding from scratch. For instance, it had multiple RTEs, Select2, etc. built-in and ready to go. It’s more like a detailed and thorough UI framework with many features.
The Good
One of the biggest advantages of using such templates was the speed at which I could get my project up and running. With a ready-made theme, I was able to focus more on customizing the theme to fit my project’s requirements rather than building everything from scratch and writing and dealing with CSS and basic JS codes. This significantly reduced my development time. Another advantage was the quality of the themes. ThemeForest has a high standard for the themes they accept into their marketplace. This means that most of the themes you find on ThemeForest are well-coded, well-documented and adhere to best practices. Also, some themes come with a boilerplate for the back-end, which is a great way to get started with the back-end development process too, and that is a great plus.
The Not-So-Good
However, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. One of the challenges was the customization process. While ThemeForest themes are customizable, the process can be complex and unique to each theme, especially if you’re not familiar with the theme’s codebase. Most themes are built on top of bootstrap or other UI frameworks, but the naming conventions and elements structure might vary. This can slow down development time if you’re not careful.
The Verdict
Despite the challenges, I found that using ThemeForest themes significantly sped up my front-end development process. It allowed me to build up a dashboard in 2 days (one day on back-end and the next day on front) and focus more on the unique aspects of my project, rather than spending time on boilerplate code.
So, would I recommend ThemeForest to other front-end developers? Absolutely! But with a caveat: make sure you’re prepared for the customization process and be patient when searching for the perfect theme. There are many multi-purpose and comprehensive themes out there that you can use for multiple projects. Once you get familiar with it in the first project, the second is going to be super easy.