New theme for your marketplace - Eta

Eta theme has arrived at start of this summer and become very popular between our customers, definitely NO. 1 theme in July & August so far - and we would like you to thank for your support and feedback ❤️. Anyway you might wonder why there is not more themes, why it takes so much time, why there are limited amount of themes for specific business like pets, real estate, adult services, cars, boats etc.

Theme development timeline

You might wonder how much time it takes us to develop theme - especially in "AI world". At very beginning let me note that unfortunatelly we've not found any model or service that would be able to design theme that would be at least close to our UX & UI standards. All AI models will generate generic, simple, amateur-looking themes those are significantly worse then Sigma theme - that should act as very default building stone.

So as usual we build themes slowly, precisely and manually, overall timeline can reach 6-9 months:

• Ideas collection, initial drafts - 2-3 monhts
• Design default page elements - 1 month
• Overall theme design for development - 1 month
• Main development of theme - 2 months
• Secondary development of theme (mobile layout, RTL, light-dark modes, ...) - 2-4 weeks
• Testing & re-designs, plugin integration testing (iterative approach Testing -> Development -> Testing -> ...) - 1 month
• Final pixel-perfect testing and adjustments, UX optimization - 2-4 weeks
• Pre-release, release and after-release activities - 2-4 weeks

If you consider amount of time put into each theme, you must realize we put a lot of personal time and love into it, so each theme we produce is appreciated by our customers and it has as few bugs as theoretically possible.

Limited number of themes

Osclass is wonderful, fast, lightweight and powerful software for classifieds, marketplace, directories and similar kinds of business. But, Osclass is not Wordpress, Osclass is not Joomla, Osclass is not Magneto or any other "generic - ultimate" script where you can run anything. All these global brands are build with simple idea - you can run anything on it - blog, ecommerce, even classifieds, portfolio. For many of these it's great, for some businesses like ecommerce or classifieds, it's great at start, later you get into troubles, as it does not manage large sites well. It's not build for it, then you start looking for specific script - like Osclass, Prestashop, and similar.

What does it mean?

Simply - Osclass will never have millions of users like Wordpress has. Simply because business is not so large. This has direct impact on products - especially themes - there is not enough customers where it would make sense to build theme for let's say Real Estate only. It's simply not sustainable business, development effort is not worth of it.

Theme design process and inspiration

Usually we rarely design anything from scratch without having idea. I personally like to browse tens and tens of various sites and check if there is something we've not integrated or used in any of themes. Something similar is done by whole team. We design inputs, selects and textareas, draft home page, search page, move to login/register/contact pages, then user account, item page and publish page are often last. Then we move to mobile design. It's not really what you could call as "professional design", but it's what always work. We also try to avoid pushing various "modern but useless" elements - many seen on different sites like ton of animations and crazy element shifts. These all usually results in wonderful theme - like Eta.

Eta theme

Finally we can summarize what we've tried to do in Eta theme - and you might evaluate if we've been successful there or not.

• Lightweight header with direct search option and useful links - where we later added menu to have everything handy
• "Delta-like" home page search box - later we've added recent search quick links and "my location" link with quick remove button from cookies
• Slider that was finally designed as stand-alone plugin. Why? in last ~8 years we've not designed theme with slider so we took this opportunity to show that slider on home page can still be a great thing
• Seo links and text in footer - as in today's age, especially for content, you need multiple options to provide FAQs and extra content for AI crawlers to make your site citated in AI results
• Boxed search page with "Zeta-like" filtering options and innovative approach for sort, view type etc.
• Boxed item page with new way to integrate comments
• Simple and easy-to-user publish page
• Next-gen user account section

Comments section

About seller section

Boxed search section

Home page search section

Home page seo links section

User account dashboard section

User account listings section

User profile section

Conclusion

For OsclassPoint team, I truly believe you like our latest theme and you can understand why things are happening in given order and why it takes so much time. It's been 2 years from time Zeta theme has been deployed, but this of course does not mean that Zeta would be oldish or that everyone should switch to Eta. We try to create themes in way there is whole ecosystem with many free and premium options and you have good ability to choose what is best for your business and your classifieds or marketplace.