Airing a few grievances
Hello Betheme,
I have been using your theme for a few weeks, and I just thought I'd air a few grievances I've had after having experience with other themes that offer some options Betheme doesn't.
To me, Betheme looks like the kind of theme people use by picking one of 230+ demo templates and basically just replacing all of the already placed info with their own. There are a lot of lacking features for in depth customization, features I've experienced with themes that are far less popular than BeTheme.
The documentation is incredibly extensive, but a lot of it is just providing pictures and small explanations for options you can easily find yourself through the themes menus. I find myself getting frustrated regularly by options I would love to have but don't. I'll try to be constructive and not come off as overly critical. Most of my problems could be solved VERY easily if I were just more knowledgeable of CSS/html
I am a graphic designer trying to learn Html and Css, but I am too new to know enough to build a site from scratch. Seeing the code created by using a drag and drop builder is incredibly helpful to me. The muffin builder is entirely separate from the default wordpress editor / visual composer. This means that If I want to look at all of the code that is created on the page by using the muffin builder drag and drop, I can't. Every other site and theme I've used has a very up front and center approach to letting users see and change the html/css of their site
It seems to me Betheme has opted to offer more theme and header variations, rather than allowing greater customization for fewer premade options. I'd really love to control the scroll speed of my site, to add a custom loading screen animation, to have image/button hover effects, to have different parallax effects to choose from, The progress bars have this random diagonal stripe background but I can't change it, I can only change the color, random things like that.
Another problem I am having is that there are options within the betheme menus, and then conflicting options within the betheme elements. For instance, I can place a button through the menus pick a background color and font color, though I cannot choose the hover effect color (why?). In the betheme menus I can go to colors and scroll down to button and also pick a button background and button color, there is also a section to choose button style, but the button styles are each a different color.
What is the difference between button background / color in the betheme options, button background / font in the element options, and button style?? I am confused which become the overridden options. I've tinkered around with the settings quite a bit but some options i change do something and some do completely nothing.
I really want to have my menu bar show a logo on the left side and menu options on the right side, like it shows in many of the header presets. However, whenever I pick one of these layouts, the logo shows on the left and the menu items immediately to the right of them with hardly any space. If there is an option to change this, it isn't located in the same section as where you choose the premade header layout, which is very counter intuitive.
I also want to be able to change the background color of my header, which there is an option for in the theme color section, however, when changing this I see literally no effect to the header. To me this means that the header color option only applies to certain premade header choices. Why are some header options sprawled out through different menus? It seems like when you click on options and go to a specific section, it would make logical sense to have all of the options for that section in one place, and more so it makes sense to offer an explanation on why color changes to the bar might not work, for instance, "HEADER COLOR - #------ *note header color will only work with *blank, blank, blank premade header options". This way, i don't have to change the header color, and then click and cycle through each of the premade header options just to see which options the header color change works with.
And moreso, with the sticky header all of the sudden there are a few options for that such as "light" and "dark". All of the sudden I am sitting there wondering why on earth there is a header color option in the color section, and then a completely different method of choosing color for a sticky header, which on a sad note only offers 2 different themes.
Let's say I have a dark picture as my front page, I want a transparent header space with a white logo left side / white menu item font right side (which by the way, I cannot find a way to have the menu font be a different color than the default). Then, when I scroll, I want a sticky header that changes to a color of my choosing (lets just say dark grey) and I want the menu item font to stay white. To the best of my ability I could find no menu options which provided this amount of customization, which seems like a very basic amount of customization.
Now that all being said, Betheme has definitely proven to be one of the easier themes to use. The cross platform stability is really amazing, I can just build the site and it looks great on mobile. Like I said before, the documentation and video tutorials are great too, I am just struggling (mostly due to my own inability to understand how to edit the theme's html / css) with the lack of extra customization that I am looking for.
Comments
we understand what you are trying to tell us and would like to understand so we will try to explain it as easy as possible. You are simply asking why we can not add an option to every possible element/item/shortcode/background/etc. It's very simply - we can not do this because of your hosting limits. There is many hosting providers that share servers between to many users and your real configuration has nothing to do with what they advertise. And because most of our customers have no idea about the hosting services and even don't know how to check real configuration, they use very poor services with a though they bought a better one. It is not a problem for us to add an option to any item/shortcode/place/background/etc but after it would be a problem for most users because if we would like to add such additional options, there would be probably 3 or even 5 times of current options. That's the reason why we can not add an option for every possible place and sometimes it is much easier and lighter to use custom css. So if you have a problem with something on your site, you can point it on this forum with links to your site where you would like to do something and don't know how (because there is no option for this) and we will explain you how to do it.
Hope this makes sense and would be much clearer now. Thanks!