I Keep Going Back to 2013-Era Themeforest

When Themeforest was the place you went to buy a design, around 2013, WordPress dominated everything. The site had more themes than you could browse in a week. Most of them, in my view, weren’t great. But there was something those templates did that I keep going back to: they looked like templates. Generic enough that you could dress them up for almost any brand. You’d buy one, swap the logo, adjust the colors, replace the copy, and it would carry your business without fighting you the whole way.

Then Framer and Webflow arrived, and the floor moved up fast. The templates you can buy today are genuinely impressive. Smooth animations, tight typography, real visual identity. Things that would have taken a senior designer three weeks to build in 2018 ship as a $49 template in 2025.

The part I keep getting stuck on is what happened after that quality jump.

Beautiful and stuck

The way I see it, templates got so visually specific that they stopped fitting real businesses. You browse the Framer Marketplace and everything looks great in the preview. Then you try to replace the hero copy and the whole thing pulls against you. It was designed around six words in a specific font weight, for a SaaS product with three pricing tiers and a waitlist. If you sell consulting, it can feel like there’s nothing here for you.

This doesn’t feel accidental to me. The best-looking templates are often, in my view, the least useful ones. They look designed to win the preview, not to carry a real business.

What I miss

The old Themeforest themes weren’t pretty. But they were forgiving. They left enough room for your brand to fit inside. The new wave, the way I read it, decided beauty over flex. As a buyer, I think we lost something there.

I’m trying to build the templates I’d want to buy. You can browse them at yolktemplates.com.