It has been a few years since I've used TemplateToaster. I just renewed my Professional license. I can see, though, that there is much work that needs to be done. Don't get me wrong, TemplateToaster is a great a product. However, there are areas that have not improved in years (i.e. 5+).
1. Speed
For some time time now TemplateToaster has lagged in speed. That is, clicking on something and having to wait several seconds for something to pop up. I would have thought that by now this would have been resolved.
2. Community Support
While the Templates Marketplace is great, there's still much work that needs to be done. I feel it would be easier to navigate the marketplace if one were able to browse templates by category (e.g. business, education, culinary/food, travel, etc). And then sort by type of template (e.g. Joomla, WordPress, etc) as well as by price (i.e. Free or not free).
The other issue with the marketplace is downloading a template. From an Internet Marketing standpoint, I totally get trying to force people to share the download with others. However, that sharing doesn't allow one to actually download. It only sends an email with a download link. Why not just let someone download it? On top of that, if I'm already logged in to my TemplateToaster account, why even send me a download link? Jjust let me download the theme or project file.
The theme download email seems to be a bit quirky. Sometimes the email contains a link to download the theme and the TemplateToaster project file. Other times it's only a link to download the theme. I don't understand why there's even a button in the email for me to download TemplateToaster. Seems to be a template email for everyone, no mater if a TT registered user or not.
With the community are the forums. Wow! Thisis like someone took all the questions and threw them in a blender. As was said in another post about this, there's so many freely available forum softwares out there. phpBB, Discord, and SMF for free. If commerical there's vBulletin as well as a few others. There simply is no excuse for a commercial software company to not have a decent forum given how much freely available resources are out there.
3. TemplateToaster Clunky
Another issue with templates, but within TemplateToaster. As with Issue #1, speed, loading templates in TemplateToaster is almost impossible. When I'm under the General tab and click ton Templates, it takes several seconds for just a few (i.e. five) templates to load. I then click on the More Templates text. This causes several more templates to load. The problem is that most won't load. I'll see a silhouette of what should be a template, but no actual image. I put my mouse over it and I get the two options of: Live Preview or Download. Live Preview really isn't a live preview. It brings me to the template page on TemplateToaster where I can see a screenshot of the theme. In essence, the only way there seems to be to view the theme or template is to go through the tedious process of the download email and hope that the email actually contains a download link to the project file.
While I love TemplateToaster, I feel there's so much work that needs to be done and I'm curious as to why all these issues and the way it's set up. This is not only frustrating form the standpoint of a consumer, but as a web developer. If I had a commercial product out on the market, I'd definitely have a decent forum setup as they're quite easy to setup as well as an automated system setup where folks could download themes as I suggested. This can easily be achieved in WordPress (my preferred CMS of choice). I'm sure it could be setup using other CMSes. Looking at the HTML of the front page of the TemplateToaster webste, it seems as if it's running off of WordPress. Therefore, all of what I suggested could easily be setup.
Speaking of the TemplateToaster website, I believe there may be an issue with your DNS settings. When I go to www.templatetoaster.com I get an error (404 - Page Not Found). However, if I go to the website without the www it works. For whatever reason there's no DNS for www or it's not configured properly. I haven't done a DNS records search to be able to see what all DNS records are set to for the TLD and the www part.
