MyThemeShop.com Review

	9/10
Website:	www.mythemeshop.com/
Contact:	www.mythemeshop.com/contact-us/
Phone:	N/A
Location:	USA
Cost:	$45
Year Founded:	2011

 
As both business and our social lives move increasingly onto the Web, and within the Web, onto mobile devices, it makes more and more sense for website operators to integrate their web designs with mobile-friendly technology. That is where MyThemeShop.com comes in. The company is dedicated to producing for its clients’ websites that operate as smoothly on a handheld device or on a tablet as they do on a computer.

 

The company designs and codes websites on behalf of its website-owning clients, and works closely with them to ensure that their sites will provide a great user experience on any device.

The firm specializes in high-quality, custom site designs built for attractiveness, functionality, and compatibility with mobile devices. The do not, however, provide their own hosting services, preferring to focus on design and functionality, and leave the server support to others.

The company offers narrated video tutorials that explain all the functionality that is built into the websites they produce. Clients can customize the themed sites that the company produces, by using their own code edits or design edits through use of Photoshop PSD files.

The themes, moreover, are compatible with all major and most other third-party plugins. The firm includes the most commonly used features in its themes to assist with this process. (They do not, however, provide support for third-party plugins or tools). The company’s themes are supported by all of the latest browsers, and include fall-back support permitting proper functioning even in most outdated browsers.

They also work with every host that supports WordPress. To be absolutely sure, you will want to contact your hosting site to confirm that it supports the latest version of WordPress, MySQL 5 or higher, and PHP5 or higher. You can also choose the company’s recommended webhosting, for which they supply a link at their website. The themes they produce are also fully compatible with WordPress Multisite.

Featured Products

The firm offers free themes, a basic, single-theme purchase, an Extended Membership plan, and its ThemeForest product. The themed website designs produced by the company are its products, and there are essentially too many of those to list. We can list their categories, though, and these includes themed site templates for blogs, magazines, eCommerce, and business.

Because their visual flair is a core attribute, we recommend interested readers venture over and take a look. Meanwhile, we’ll summarize their features, which include compatibility with translation software. This advantage will be particularly attractive to internationally-minded website owners, especially commercial sites that seek to extend their goods and services to non-English speaking consumers.

Since there are over six billion such people on the planet, growing in many cases increasingly prosperous and ready and able to spend, translation capability will be a critical factor for many commercial sites. In order to take advantage of this feature, you will be able to use a .po file for your themed site that will support translation based on some simple steps that are laid out in a tutorial that the company offers.

Many highly visual and graphic design oriented site owners will want to know if the service includes Photoshop PSDs. It does, but only for its Extended Membership plan. This feature is not available for its single-theme purchases or free themes.

ThemeForest clients receive lifetime free support and updates. You should note that the refund policy for its other products does not apply to ThemeForest clients, for whom a separate refund policy has been established. ThemeForest also involves some different licenses that are required on certain domains and websites, as well as a different developer license.

One disadvantage of the themes offered by the company is that they do not work with WordPress.com. You would need to have a self-hosted WordPress installation for that, and the company does offer a link for such installation instructions.

Prices and Payment

The firm’s single-theme product, which it recommends for startups, is sold for a one-time $45 fee. It includes priority bug fixing, 24/7 support, a secured and optimized code, lifetime usage, copyright removal, one-click updates, narrated video tutorials, and detailed documentation. Not bad for a product that will allow your website to absolutely shimmer.

The firm’s standard membership costs $87, plus a $15 monthly charge thereafter. In exchange for this financial commitment, you receive all of the features of the single-theme product, plus access to all 86 WordPress themes, and at least one new theme per month.

The firm’s Extended Membership product costs $127, plus a $15 monthly charge, and includes all of the standard membership features, plus access to all seven of the firm’s WordPress plugins, access to PSD files, and customized support for your related website projects.

Oh, and if you don’t have any money to spare, they will just go ahead and offer you a free account that includes access to 18 free themes and plugins, and even offers lifetime support and updates. To us, this represents both simple generosity, and confidence that clients will be so pleased with the themed offerings, that they will sing the company’s praises to other site owners, and when their businesses grow, they will come back as paying customers. We like.

Customer Service

Support begins with an extremely active forum, where past client inquiries, and the firm’s responses (along with helpful responses from other members), are categorized by subject, creating a kind of living encyclopedia for newer customers to utilize. For premium membership questions, we saw listings for over 15,000 topics, which gave rise to over 67,000 responses. That’s a lot of institutional knowledge to draw on. And even the free service has drawn over 1,000 topics, triggering over 5,000 replies.

At the time when we wrote this, 53 clients and “moderators,” or support personnel, were online in the various active forums. This forum-based form of support has the advantage of offering all the answers of the past, searchable quite quickly, along with direct support from both moderators and other members, which you can access simply by entering an active forum, or starting one yourself.

Criticism

We have found very little criticism, and what there was focused not on quality or support, but on the pricing of its premium services. Clients seemed especially pleased with the seamless compatibility across desktop and mobile for their sites, and there was also a good deal of appreciation expressed for the free services offered to those whose web-based activities had not yet begun to bear financial fruit. It’s always nice to see a company that extends a helping hand, so that more and more of us can share the bounty.

Final Thoughts

Just this year, a tipping point in mobile Internet usage occurred, as for the first time more than half of all Internet usage shifted from computers to mobile devices. Site owners need to respond swiftly with sites that offer smooth usability on mobile devices, and MyThemeShop is a highly useful resource for accomplishing this increasingly critical task. As it turns out, the revolution will not be televised, but it will be linked, and most of the people doing the linking will be using their smartphones and tablets.

While you will need to confirm the compatibility of its products with your web hosting service provider, so long as that question results in a “yes,” we can recommend this company as one that is well-placed to solve an increasingly critical problem for website owners who may have gotten their start back when a desktop-compatible website was sufficient, but who now know that it’s time to go mobile.