It’s been almost three months since the last Wpdesigner theme release. I’m coming back to creating free WordPress themes with a theme series called, Seven Deadly Sins. Greed will be the first to be release. As you can see, Greed will have ten sidebars, if not eleven.
In the previous post about business models for WordPress theme designers, I mentioned a little about designing stock themes. Here’s how I think stock themes should be done.
Why create a theme for sale at $10 per download? Why not create a theme for free and let people upgrade to an advance version for the same $10?
For now, the fact is not many people would buy stock themes or pay-per-download themes at $10 to $50. The best you can do is average ten sales for each theme. That’s a waste of time if you’re not outsourcing at a very low rate.
If you create a great theme and release it for public use, you’ll get the traffic needed to generate sales. Once you’ve gotten the traffic, allow users downloading your theme to upgrade to an advance or premium version of that theme for $5 to $10. The upgraded version would include color scheme variations, more integrated plugins, and other custom features that are not available to the free version
You’re not tricking or egging anyone into buying the advance version as long as the advance version has custom features or extra details that themes don’t normally provide.
One drawback to this business model is the pricing. Charging for a non-exclusive theme at $50 per download is possible, but not likely for upgrades only. However, the traffic generated from releasing a free version will balance out that drawback. Along with selling upgrades, you can leverage the remaining traffic to sell advertisements on your blog.
Nowadays, horizontal menu tabs are everywhere. How do you make your tabs stand out from the rest? Make them overlap.
Take Wpdesigner current design for example. It took a while to get the tabs to overlap, but the effect is well worth it.
Analyze this example to learn how to achieve that effect. If that example is too difficult for you, stay tuned for the upcoming Wpdesigner WordPress tutorial, which will show you how to create a theme from scratch and how to create tabs that overlap, in details.
If you’re not familiar with horizontal menus, learn how to at css.maxdesign.com.au. Then head over to AListApart.com for the sliding door technique (pretty up your menu with sliding background images).
I pointed out that multiple plugin support is a factor of a popular WordPress theme, in a previous post. Here’s a list of popular plugins your theme should support.
Iffect.net is the first by-request, blog design review of Wpdesigner’s review series.
So far, only blogs in need of redesigns have been reviewed. With Iffect.net, the challenge is that its design is already clean and clear. There’s not much room for improvement, unless you want to tear it apart and create a completely new look (based on its structure).
I’ll take advantage of this challenge to go over some trivial points that would make a regular review very lengthy.
While I was browsing Iffect, I tried to click on the banner several times, to go back to the home page. But, the banner is an image background, not an inline image link that you can click on. That is a NO-NO. When your logo or banner is that large and prominent, it needs to link back to your home page.
I don’t like how the Home, About, and Contact links are pushed to the right. If most of your design’s alignment is to the left then you shouldn’t align anything to the right, unless you don’t want normal users to use it. I also don’t like how those links are separated from the RSS, Email, and Question Mark links. I understand they’re two separate groups of links, but you can place them on the same line and still give the RSS, Email, and Question Mark links icons to distinguish them. In this case, it’s more clutter than convenience, but that’s purely my personal opinion.
I looked through the source codes and there’s a lot of tags that were not closed properly, especially the line-break (BR) tags. This is nothing to worry about because your source codes don’t need to be completely valid. Another invalid area is the Related Posts list. The unordered-list (UL) for that area is not structured correctly. The list of related links and title, Related Posts, need to sit within a list-item (LI) tag.
I like the easy-to-read, big post titles, but the post-title underline is a bit distracting. It’s too bold. The underline’s color should be different from the post-title link color.
For the postmetadata area (comments link, categories, and etc.), I don’t like how the category links are floating to the left. That presents a problem when you list a certain post under several categories. If you do attach a certain post to multiple categories, the category link-listing will not fit in that space, which ends up looking out of place. If you scroll to the bottom, you can see that the category links and “keep looking” link are on the same line. That’s because the category links couldn’t fit on one line.
I had the same problem with Wpdesigner’s previous postmetadata layout.
Like I mentioned in other reviews, you shouldn’t use the H1 tag multiple times on one single page. This problem is very common among WordPress themes, but with Iffect.net’s design, even the Comments title link uses the H1 tag. That’s definitely something that should get fixed.
Because Iffect.net’s search form doesn’t use a search button, it has the, “search this site…,” phrase as default text for the search form to indicate that it is a search form. That’s no problem. But when you click on the search form, that text doesn’t disappear. Anyone using that search form has to delete the default text before typing in the search term. I don’t know about you, but that’s annoying for me. You can fix this problem by using Javascript to make the default text disappear, once a user click on the search form.
Like the rest of the design, the sidebar is very clean. But, sidebar block titles or subheadings are in caps. If people are having trouble reading your headlines, when you display text in all caps, make sure that you increase the letter-spacing through CSS. That will make the text (in all caps) much easier to read. In Iffect.net’s case, it’s okay.
Apart from the inconsistent structure of the sidebar (not all blocks or sections of Iffect’s sidebar are structure the same way), I don’t like the black link color because the sidebar text is also black. The links should be blue. I’m aware that a long list of bright blue links can be overwhelming. If that’s the excuse for black links then make the sidebar links dark blue.
Comments are well-spaced and separated from each other. The only thing I don’t like is the background color. The comment text and background need more contrast.
Although it’s important to stand out with a unique, well-design blog, don’t stress over it. Design is subjective. Blogging is about content. Focus on content.
Also, like I stated above, this is the first by-request review, if you have any site to suggest or request a review for, I’ll review it, but note that I will not review every suggested or requested site.
The purpose of this lunch break is to clear the air about some issues and let you know what’s going on with this blog. Mainly, I want to address several accusations made against me. I read those accusations before and have been holding my tongue for a long time, until now.
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It’s Gizmodo.com’s turn to get reviewed for the review series. My reviews are meant to give tips and help you improve your blog’s design and performance. Although Gizmodo is not WordPress powered and each blog platform is different from the next, blog structure and presentation are pretty much the same so let’s get going with this review.
The main Gizmodo problems are its organization and colors.
I came across an article claiming that green on yellow is easier to read than black on white. Personally, I’m not going to use green on yellow anytime soon. However, a full page of black text on white background is very hard on the eyes. After all, browsing a website is not like reading a book. That’s why I try to stick with the black on white combination, but also try to limit the total amount of white background on a web page.
With that said, I like Gizmodo’s background color. It’s bright, but not completely white. On the other hand, I don’t like its text (dark blue) and link colors (brown orange). The overall combination doesn’t have much contrast. A color scheme without enough contrast isn’t friendly and is especially a problem for users with poor vision.
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Recently, Wpdesigner.com was nominated for Top 5 blogs of 2007, in the web development category. Wpdesigner is up against formidable opponents.
If you vote for Wpdesigner, you’ll be first to receive my upcoming WordPress theme and first to grab a copy of an advance, complete WordPress theme tutorial (currently under development).
Thank you for voting!
One popular (great) theme garners more rewards than ten average themes. If you don’t have the patience to put out a great theme, you’re wasting your time. So, while you sit there to admire your creation, here are some things to think about to better your theme.
Although the future for free WordPress themes is more and more plugin support and customizable theme options, looks matter. Bloggers are judging free themes, mostly, by the quality of their designs. With less experienced theme users, you need to make a good first impression.
Second, your theme needs to function well. Cross-browser compatibility is a must. A widget-ready sidebar is a plus (should be a must). Fluid width is a plus (expand and contract, based on users’ resolution). And if your theme supports multiple plugins, you’ve got a winner.
Last but not least is patience, design is about details, styling is about details, coding is about detailed testing. Without a lot of patience to take care of the details, you end up with an average theme.
Before you start another free theme, make a check list. Don’t release that theme until every item on that list is checked.
It’s a shame theme designers don’t have too many options in the WordPress world. Luckily, there is more than one business model. However, only one of them seems to be worthwhile and profitable, for now. Below are the models that I’m aware of.
Small business owners are trying to take their presence online and / or trying to establish a relationship with the clients. Targeting small business is the most profitable option for freelance WordPress designers. Small business owners are more willing to pay you what you deserve, usually upwards of $1,000.
If you’re not working for small business owners, you’re probably making anywhere from $200 to $800 per project. Regardless of how much clients would pay, generally, they’re annoying. (Web developers and customer service is a bad mix.) Why not get paid more for the same amount of annoyance?
Unless you’re under contract for big projects after big projects, targeting small businesses is the way to go. You can look to solostream.com for an example of a WordPress designer catering the small business niche.
Basically, you create a theme and sell it multiple times, like $49.95 per download. This option is a bit risky because you have to sell a lot to profit and it’s kind of NOT worthwhile if you don’t get the full $49.95 back or can’t find great designers to outsource at a very low rate. Not to mention, you have to pay online transaction fees for the theme purchases and worry about restricting usage to only one theme per domain.
The good part is that once you’re done, you’re done; you can sell the same theme over and over again. On the other hand, let’s say every theme is worth a $1,000. You’d have to sell more than twenty copies per theme. Twenty seems like a low number, but not many people are willing to buy WordPress themes at $49.95 (stock themes range anywhere from $15 to $60). You’re lucky if you can sell ten copies, regardless of the quality.
You create a free WordPress theme. Look for sponsors to pay you to put text links (to the sponsors’ sites) in the footer of your theme. And then, you hope a lot of people download and use your theme.
This is the last option that I would wish any theme designer to resort to. Actually, I wouldn’t want anyone to follow this business model at all. You’re basically selling yourself short. It’s not even worthwhile as extra-income. Here’s Matt Coddington’s detailed break down of this business model.
If you’ve found another way to make money with WordPress themes or have an idea on how WordPress designers could make more money, be sure to let me know so I can add it to this list.
Read my review of Blogging Tips on BloggingTips.com. With every new review, I try to point out something new. For BloggingTips.com, I focused more on ads integration (how to increase your click-through rate) for the most part.
Kevin of Blogging Tips recently asked me to guest blog on BloggingTips.com. Immediately, I was interested because I never guest-blogged before and because I always wanted to run a blog about…blogging tips. What a surprise huh?
(Is guest blogging the way low-level bloggers like me have fun? There’s not much joy that you can get from writing a guest blog entry, but it was fun for me, without the smiling and laughing uncontrollably of course.)
Instead of writing about a topic that would compliment Blogging Tips current topics, I succumbed to reviewing the blog itself because I couldn’t help myself. Read my review to learn how to better integrate your ads.
Thank you for visiting Wpdesigner.com. To get in touch with me, go to feedback for contact information.
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