Make

Really anything less than 5 stars seems ridiculous, given what functionality most theme authors give you. This theme doesn’t try to shoehorn you into a design. It does what it should: get out of the way and let the developer design.

Thanks Theme Foundry!

I was fooled by the hype on the website, and the review by Chris Lema.

Make is a novel idea to start, it uses a basic theme, and a plug-in (for the Make Plus edition). The claim is that it clean code and doesn’t deal with all the nasty overhead of the clunky visual builders. It also sells itself a small business friendly theme. Nice idea, in concept…

Unfortunately that’s where it stops.
You need to do all of you customization through the CSS panel, and the basic options that are available are really not that relevant. For example the “white label” feature is simply a checkbox that shows/hides the text, not actually an option to replace the text with something more pertinent. As a result you need to create you own code, and then find yourself with two lines in your footer, one that’s left aligned for the code that you wrote, and one that’s right aligned for the social icons.

Even things liked padding, margins, etc… need to be manually coded in, which, in this day and age should be easily controlled through the customizer (a native device of WordPress), and without having to rely on clunky GUIs.

The support has also been less than great. Direct questions have not been directly answered (“Do you have documentation that shows me what classes affect what parts of the layout? Ideally in a visual form.”), and have resulted in just pointing to WordPress information, and mentioning that it’s 100% compliant.

To me, this ultimately comes down to misrepresentation and a basic misunderstanding of their customer base. They claim that it’s a small business friendly theme, but I don’t know many small businesses that have an excess of time to figure out how to customize the website. Sure, for web development shops it might be interesting, but for most SMBs they are so slammed for time that when presented between Make vs. Barebones WordPress vs. Squarespace (or the likes) the answer does not land in the favor of Make.

I’m more than happy to revise my 1 star if I’m given a good reason to do so.

I have used many-many themes before, but I absolutely fell in love in the first 1 hour working with it. I wish I could found it earlier! Easy going, fast! step by step building with no complications, really doing what I want, having any customizations that are needed until not using the plus-version.

• This topic was modified 2 days, 20 hours ago by palagyiadri.

I love being able to access most features on the customize panel instead of 5 layers in.

Can Make be used on WordPress.com sites? I have a friend I’d like to help, but they are not hosted.

I just used it for my client.

I activated the theme on a new site and all was well until I used the customize page. Within 5 minutes style.css was no longer getting called. Deleted it and reinstalled and the same thing happened again. Updated from WP 4.4.3 to the latest version, no change. Switched to other installed themes and there was no issue with them.
So without doubt, there’s something fundamental wrong with this theme and I can’t recommend it when there are so many other themes that work fine.

Theme is a lot more difficult to get up and running than I thought it would be. I tried following the support documents and without a good and fairly deep understanding of site design and terminology, getting up and running will be difficult. I made the mistake of purchasing the $99 plug-in that goes along with the theme based on the The Theme Foundry’s testimony on how easy the theme was to to configure and deploy. It was a total and complete ripoff!

I use make theme and love it, it is easy to edit with the layout builder ou with the code editor. It is beauty and the forum is great!

Appreciated the assistance in getting things set up, since I was very much a beginner at the time. Fantastic, personal, authentic support.

Theme is easy to use and easy to keep a site up-to-date with. We Use the Free version currently but may look at upgrading to Make Plus in the future.

When operating this tool to create a theme it is it is not much you can achieve with this “free” version. Rather, this is an advertisement to purchase plus or pro.

I am crazy about Make. Clean, customizable, linear, divine. So refreshing in comparison to other bloated, counter-intuitive themes out there….