Product Strategy

[terrysmith]

I purchased Neighborhood about two months ago and have been customizing it and adding content after a very, very long and intensive research phase with all of the top theme companies. I have about two more months of work to go before my site goes live.

I am invested heavily in my decision, but now with the release of Aetlier I question if I made the right choice. Don’t get me wrong, Aetlier looks great, and there are a lot of things that I like about it from an eCommerce perspective. However, why did you create a new theme instead of making these changes in Neighborhood? Do you plan to roll the improvements back into Neighborhood as well? Is this your product and revenue strategy? To keep releasing new themes instead of building a great framework on which all of them are based? I thought Neighborhood was your single, eCommerce theme where you would keep making improvements. Why have you not at least contacted your Neighborhood customers to let them know what your direction is?

I currently see no reason why I shouldn’t expect to throw it all away again in 6 months when you release a new theme if I want to keep my site on top technology-wise.

Terry

[terrysmith]

Also…

What is the list of features that are in Atelier which are not in Neighborhood? Most importantly for all of your Neighborhood customers, what does Atelier NOT do that Neighborhood does? Where are these lists?

I hope you can understand that since, to my knowledge, none of the above has been published anywhere is really a total “crap shot” for someone like myself to buy your theme, install it, and see what might still work and what doesn’t. With a blog that’s not too hard. With an eCommerce store there’s a lot more to it.

Terry

[Mohammad – SUPPORT]

Hi,
The developer of theme will assist you shortly.
Thanks
Mohammad

[Swift Ideas – Ed]

Hi @terrysmith

We still actively maintain Neighborhood, and while we’d love to bring it to the latest framework which we now continually maintain, unfortunately it’s not that simple. With Cardinal we developed the latest version of the framework from which all future themes will use. We are looking at the viability of implementing them back into Neighborhood, but with different css frameworks being used, it’s a tricky procedure that we’d need to get 100% right, as we don’t want to risk customers left with issues that require them to fix things on their site.

With Atelier we’ve spent a huge amount of time developing new performance functionality, which we call “Swift SmartScript”. We detect the contents of a page when you save it, and store meta values based on the content. We then use these values to remove unnecessary scripts from the page, including from selected 3rd party plugins. We found in most tests this removed upwards of 60% of scripts from the page, and greatly increased load times. This does require each page to be saved once the functionality is enabled, but there are bulk save plugins you can download. We’ve also added built in stylesheet minification.

In terms of functionality, we’ve worked on greatly improving the mobile experience, especially in terms of shop browsing, with layout options, mobile filters, etc. We’ve also added an option to provide a different logo for the mobile header.

There is a new slideout menu option, header aux builder, newsletter bar, global header banner, row top/bottom slant styling, and an all round slicker design.

We are looking at bigger updates for Neighborhood in the near future, but it is far from a “crap shot”. If something doesn’t work, we are always quick on it to resolve.

Hope that explains it.

– Ed