It takes quite a bit of extra work (and time) to add all the customization options in. I do have plans to improve my marketplace themes and add-ons, though.

Concrete does have a built-in theme customization tool. However, adding options to change colors for all of the theme's elements can be rather challenging, as sometimes the styles interfere with the Concrete interface. Lots of time has to be put into testing in different environments.

I am always looking to improve my marketplace items. I think the reason most developers, including myself, don't spend the extra time on these options is mainly because we aren't motivated to do so. I barely sell one theme per month. So, I don't see any justification for spending lots of time on something that may or may not sell, or be used at all (if I choose to make it free).

I agree with not spending too much time on designs, instead, I do take my time when it comes to documentation, searching for inspiration, for the right tools, new methods etc. For WP themes I use Lubith, a quick and flexible online theme editor in combination with Photoshop, it's the quickest way of building layouts for me.

For color palettes i use colourlovers.com, copy the HTML codes and insert them in the theme editor color cassettes. It's not that hard to choose something that fits right, you have all the needed resources online.

From our point of view, we dont really use much flat colour, we use texture and gradients to give our themes some depth, a lot of our headers footers etc are images, we do make text colours changeable, and where we do use flat colour, you will be able to change it from the customisation options, our Classique theme does have a flat background and you are able to change the colour of the background infinitely through the Concrete5 customisation options.

There currently is no ability with the customisation options to change CSS background images, so instead of creating and installing page attributes we opt to make several different versions of the same theme in a few different colour variations, we sell in the region of 30-40 themes a month, and so far a tiny percentage of those customers ask about changing headers etc to flat colours.

Until changing backgrounds becomes a stock standard feature of Concrete5 we are unlikely to be building extra option panels into our themes, at the moment our core functionality revolves around responsive design, flexible layouts, useful page types and keeping up with modern design trends.

Thanks for all the information guys, makes sense I guess if it's a lot of work and not many sales for it.

I know for me at least, I have several businesses who have logos and "company colors", and say their logo is a particular shade of blue, it's nice to be able to match exactly that color within the theme, otherwise it doesn't look as nice.

I guess I'm in the minority here, but I have to stick with themes that have custom color pallets, I did find another one though, it was called "consensus theme premium".

Most of our themes do use Concrete5's built in stylesheet editor - it's a great feature so we try and use it. Many of our themes allow fairly extensive modification, though there are some limitations of course.

Is the "stylesheet editor" something a non-techy person who buys one of your themes could use to change colors, or are you saying that's what you as a developer use to help create the themes?

That's right - something for changing colors etc.

All marketplace themes will have this to some extent, as its a requirement of approval that you have at least 3 styles that are changeable via the style sheet editor, we normally have 30+ changeable colors, fonts and font sizes in our themes.

And if I remember well even the C5 team suggests not using that possibility if not necessary for performance reasons. It would just slow the generation of the page.

Maybe it's different with 5.5.x?

There are some add-ons for adding/changeing/stretching background images.

There is an addon currently in the prb for adding gradients to any background.