"It was the best of themes. It was the worst of themes."
Great literary reference but I think you're also providing a service if you tell the world which themes to avoid. Rotten Tomatoes is popular due to their brutal honesty as well as their accuracy. And sometimes a beautiful theme has real implementation problems that aren't visually obvious.
In addition to the comment about filtering by size, etc, I'm also concerned about operational features - here are a few that come to mind:
- Bugs or lack of them
- Performance (you've been to those dog slow sites)
- Security issues (a category of bugs worth their own line)
- Dependencies - a 200kB theme really isn't 200kB if it requires 20 Javascript and CSS files packing another 4MB on.
- Known use - there's a sweet spot since you don't want to be the only one using a theme. You also don't want 90% of the other sites on the Internet to look exactly like yours.
- Open-source versus closed-source (regardless of price)
Tempting indeed, and would be a radical service: Rotten Tomato for Themes. I really like the idea, and will discuss it with the team. Can be a test for one of our sprints.
The conversion rates from someone visiting your site to making a purchase of whatever product you're selling is incredibly important in terms of revenue. You've already spent money getting the person to your site, you just need to close the deal.
Things like sliders or just generally poor design can have a big impact on conversions.
If you tracked usage of a range of ecommerce themes you could probably find a way to know which ones had great conversion rates and which ones didn't perform so well. So now when people are looking for a new ecommerce theme they can filter by the ones with the highest conversion rates.
Great literary reference but I think you're also providing a service if you tell the world which themes to avoid. Rotten Tomatoes is popular due to their brutal honesty as well as their accuracy. And sometimes a beautiful theme has real implementation problems that aren't visually obvious.