While working at Themeisle, I had the great opportunity to contribute to the Neve WordPress theme, which is used by more than 300,000+ users worldwide and has more than 1200 reviews on Worpress.org. My contribution to Neve started with expanding Neve's Demo Sites library to 300+ sites. It continued with product expansion, improving existing features,  doing the UI/UX for the new ones (including UX Research), day-to-day Product and Marketing Design tasks, hiring and mentoring the Design Interns, Design QA, and Demosites maintenance.

UX Research Data Analysis

Since the theme is a live product, we focused on a user-centered design. This approach prioritizes the users' experience, which ultimately benefits the user's website in several ways: usability, speed and performance, conversations, or theme features.

The main areas of research included analyzing the weekly and monthly data from Metabase regarding the uninstall feedback, general feedback from the users, analyzing the activity from the Facebook group, and having some discovery discussions with the users.

Demo Sites

I joined Themeisle as a Web Design intern in the Neve Theme with the objective of expanding the Demo Sites library (called Starter Sites) to more than 100+ sites. In the beginning, there were around 20-30 sites, and in the next year, we focused on reaching a significant milestone: 100 sites made in 5 different page builders (Gutenberg, Elementor, Beaver Builder, Thrive, Brizy, and Divi). My work included researching potential niches, making the Design Brief, defining the site structure, searching for examples, etc. However, the main focus was on designing and building the sites in Elementor and other page builders.

Another stage in this process was converting old Themeisle themes (Themotion, Rokophoto, Oblique, Amadeus) to Demo Sites. This was quite a challenge since it required translating unique theme features and design - to Neve design language and features.

I really enjoyed working on this stage since I had a lot of freedom, from defining the brand (logo, colors, fonts) and niche of each site - to creating and maintaining Neve's Layout System and Demo Sites Library or collaborating and supervising the site building tasks together with the internal and external contractors.

Neve 3.0

In 2021, we decided to take Neve into a new phase, which added many new features, but it also meant that we had to adapt the transition of the old features that were removed or had changed. Another step here was creating a New Landing page and demo site for Neve 3.0. Additionally, I had the opportunity to explore a Collection of vector patterns:

Other contributions included defining the Typography Scale for Neve 3, focusing on performance (we chose to use system fonts for a better loading speed) and also the default font sizes had to be optimised for mobile.

Pro Enhancements

Another stage where I contributed to Neve was the focus on adding more value to the Pro Users. This included:

• a new feature for the Blog page, where users create a Featured Post

• expanding the Neve Core Patterns collection to cover more uses-cases

• researched additional icons for Neve’s Scroll to Top option

• prototype a Color Palette Generator for the Neve Palette Switcher

• contributed to Neve Mega Menu

• Worked on Quantity Selector in Neve

• explored some improvements for the My Account page

• look into Neve Compare and Wishlist features (part of Sparks)

Global Colors

When extending the Starter Sites library, we got the users' insight that they want to save time customizing the sites - meaning that it would help them more if we had multiple available styles by default for colors and typography. This is the reason we added Global Colors in Neve, and I was responsible for expanding the Color palettes on all sites. This feature allows users to change the colors of their site from one place and apply it everywhere.

Integration with Templates Cloud

While expanding the Demo Sites Library, we realized that some users might need just single pages or part of a page (patterns), and at that point, Templates Cloud was offering only Full Site import. So, from that point, we decided to separate the Starter Sites Library into a different plugin that will work separately with Neve. This allowed us to make Neve more lightweight and also add more useful features in the Templates Cloud plugin, like wireframes, generic pages, single page import, and more. I was responsible for designing, building and releasing the Generice Pages.