I recently gave everyone the opportunity to participate in a themes survey. This was meant to gather a lot of data, much like what we do with the Ideas Forum but a bit more specific and with more tangible results.
This survey ran for two weeks, and I’ve learned a lot about what you all think in terms of WordPress themes while reading through your answers.
I also learned to not give so many open-ended questions because they’re hard to represent in a table or chart.
The Results
I’ve had to create a separate page for the results of the survey because the data is better represented on its own page, so go ahead and view the results of the survey.
I won’t cover all of the questions here. This post is about representing the survey questions you could vote on. Everything else was done by direct user input and can’t be accurately represented here.
Question 1: Rate how interested you are in each of these theme concepts.
The clear answer to this question is that people want Magazine/News themes. This is going to the top of my priorities list. You can expect to see a theme in this area before the end of February.
After that, the results aren’t as clear. There’s a lot of variance in the results and I urge you to check out the full report on this.
Question 3: What styles would you like to see the most (choose any number)?
There were two clear victors in this portion of the survey, each taking 20% of the votes: Minimalistic and Smooth.
I do find it a bit odd that the most-wanted theme concept is magazine/news and one of the most-wanted theme styles is minimalistic. Yep, that’s a bit confusing because the two ideas don’t generally go hand-in-hand.
Question 5: What’s your favorite color? Seriously.
Blue. Blue. Blue.
Although this question wasn’t necessarily a theme question, it’s pretty clear that people like the color blue, which garnered 31% of the votes.
Question 6: How many columns would best suit your site in a WordPress theme (including content and sidebar(s))?
This was a very close race between three columns and two columns, earning 43% and 42% of the votes, respectively.
It seems I’ll have to mix and match my future theme designs to accommodate the three-column crowd a bit more. I’m more of a fan of two-column designs myself, but you can expect to see some with three columns in the future mix.
Question 7: What non-standard areas would you like to see widgetized (choose any number)?
Footer Widgets won this battle, which gained 21% of the votes.
However, a placed a trick option in there that was meant only as a joke: “I want all templates to be completely widgetized.” It gained 20% of the votes. I can create this theme though. It would only take me a few minutes and a few lines of code. If you’re interested, I’ll show you how to do it in the support forums.
What do you think of these results?
Please take some time to look through the results. I’ve found many of them to be interesting. Feel free to discuss them below in the comments.
For the questions not covered here, I’ll go over them in the next post.
Hmm.. nice to see the results and check what others thought about. Footer i already widgetize. I would like to see other area also widgetized. Can we have more than primary and secondary widget areas..?
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Regards
Thinkjayant
Great to see the results of the survey – no real surprises there from my point of view.
I guess what people mean when they choose a Magazine/News style and minimalistic, is that they don’t want a theme that is too cluttered or busy – one with plenty of white space and a clean layout – my opinion only.
Justin wrote:
I would love to see this, because I voted for this option, even though you included it for fun. I think it’s a great idea and it gives more control to the theme users that don’t have the css and php skills you have.
thinkjayant — Footer widgets will be default in the next versions of Hybrid. There’s enough people either using them or asking for them that it just makes sense to have them included.
StormRider — I understand the implications of the minimalist-magazine theme, but from my experience, no matter how minimalistic I make it, users tend to clutter it even more.
Thomas — I still think you might be missing the point of the joke, which I didn’t fully explain. Fully-widgetized templates would actually make the theme harder to customize. You’d have to master CSS and know enough PHP to write custom widgets to handle all the normal functions of the theme.
For example, how would you get posts to display? You’d need a widget for that. How would you get comments to display? You’d need a widget for that as well.
Just out of curiosity and to better gauge what 20% or 30% represents.
How many people took the survey?
Thanks
Ron
I didn’t know that all widgetized area is a joke because I read this http://www.wp-fun.co.uk/2007/11/13/doing-more-with-widgets-changing-layouts/
I love widgets because I like to edit content manually in text widgets instead of editing theme/function
I want fluid layout and widgetized header and footer but I can’t find the theme like that anywhere so I created my own theme (already use on my blog but it’s not finished yet
)
minimalistic magazine layout imho: concentrate on typography, less color, less images, more negative space. It will be clutter no matter what
Pegasus Team — I might release that info in the next post.
Nice from Thailand — You’d still have to have widgets that display content. I don’t know of any widgets that do this. So, you would still have to dive into a theme’s
functions.phpfile to create those widgets.