Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> 6 steps to a better WordPress user experience

I’m a big fan of things just working, and especially so when it comes to blogs and blogging platforms. One of the lovely things about WordPress is that you can set it up how you want it and get rid of all the stuff you don’t need, so that it empowers your blogging rather than just gets in the way.

In my attempts to be more efficient (also known as “being lazy”), I’ve picked up a couple of little tips to make running and using your WordPress install that bit easier. Let’s get to it!

1. Simplify to fit your needs

Ghost has been making a big stir recently with its “just a blogging platform” tagline, but WordPress has got that covered too. There’s been a surge in popularity for “admin themes” recently; plugins which “theme” the WordPress backend. Personally, I think some of the better ones are fantastic — on sites which are straight-up blogs, I now always install the DP Dashboard plugin. The Hunter skin is a particular favourite of mine; its one column design lets you focus on one thing at a time (hint — writing).

DevPress’ admin theming plugin in action

It’s amazing how much of a difference a simpler post-writing UI makes, but when you have nothing to distract you, it’s  so much easier to just get on with writing. DP Dashboard is available as part of the DevPress subscription for $40/year — I’d definitely recommend checking it out.

Some sites need a Dashboard that’s a little more powerful, though, and for sites like WPShout, where I want the extra flexibility of having menus at my disposal, I’ll virtually always hop into distraction free writing mode when I need to concentrate. It’s not quite the same, but it’s a reasonable compromise.

2. Editor style CSS

Introduced way back in WP3.0, post editor styling lets themes apply the same styling to the post editor as is found in the main theme. The idea is that it gives you a better idea of how your content is going to appear when you actually come to publish it, and it’s a very good one. I spend a lot of time wondering how readable the final post is going to be, and being able to have content ready-styled saves a lot of time flicking into preview tabs.

However, I’m always amazed to see the number of themes which don’t offer this simple functionality. It’s not viewed as an essential feature, and thus sadly it means it gets left out a lot. If you’re using a theme which doesn’t have post editor styling, it’s very straightforward to set it up — you’ll need the relevant content styles in an editor-style.css file, in your theme’s root folder. You then just need to add the line add_editor_style(); to functions.php and WordPress will handle the rest for you.

3. Worry-free backups; easy updates

With a bunch of low-traffic sites hosted on slightly unreliable shared hosting, having everything in my install up-to-date, and a series of reliable backups is an absolute necessity. I’ve used a lot of backup solutions over the years, including WP to Dropbox and BackupBuddy, but recently I’ve started using ManageWP and it makes everything vastly, vastly easier.

I’m using the professional plan, which gives me 10 sites, one-click updates to all my WP installs, themes and plugins and automatic daily backups sent to my Dropbox (or whichever cloud storage solution floats your boat). There are even mobile apps, although I can’t say I’ve ever felt the need to update my plugins whilst commuting…

As well as the core functionality, there’s also a bunch of genuinely helpful stuff, including one-click database optimisations, uptime monitoring, Google Analytics integration and Sucuri integration. I was sceptical about how useful ManageWP was going to be, but it’s a very well made product and I’ve been very impressed. The base plan is even free, so try it out!

4. Mobile-ready publishing

I publish a lot of the content on my blog from the WordPress Android app, and to make that experience easier, I’ve made a couple of tweaks so everything works as it should. The main problem I face when publishing from mobile is that Empty Spaces, the theme I use (and built!), likes to have big featured images, but from the Android app there’s no way to add featured images. It sucks, but one can make it workable.

This trick is slightly hack-ey and can be annoying at times, but it does the job. I get round not being able to set featured images by just inserting the image at the top of the post, using CSS to hide that image and then using a plugin to auto-set the first image in the post as featured. As I said, it’s not pretty, but it works. The CSS looks like this:

/* Hides the first image in a post for use in the feature area, unless it has a caption in which case display it */
.post .entry-content img:nth-of-type(1){ display:none; }
.post .entry-content .wp-caption img:nth-of-type(1){ display:block; }

I’m then using the auto featured image plugin to grab the image I’ve stuck in the post and set it as featured. The issue of resizing comes into play, but we’ll cover that in just a moment.

5. Auto-resized images

Resizing images is a pain. A big pain. It’s a hassle to have to load up Photoshop, save for web, resize, tweak quality to get a decent filesize, export and upload for every single image you want to use, and for that reason… I don’t!

Instead, I use the much-discussed plugin from Automattic, Jetpack and I let that handle everything for me. The Photon module delivers your images via WordPress.com’s CDNs, and auto-magically resizes images to fit your content-width along the way.

It’s by no means an ideal system; file sizes are bigger and things like custom post design — with different content-widths — aren’t handled very well, but that’s a reasonable compromise for the conveninece of just being able to upload images and not worry about everything else.

6. Re-categoirse “uncategorised”

And finally, getting rid of that blasted “uncategorised” default category. This one’s probably going to only apply if you’re publishing lots of content, but if that’s you — and especially if you publish a lot of stuff on mobile — then this is a must.

If you’ve got what you’d like your new default category to be already created, this is just a case of heading to Settings -> Writing and then just choose a category to be “Default Post Category”. Hit save, and you’re done. Simple, right?

Fitter, happier, more productive

Hopefully a lot of those are going to be helpful; I’ve certainly noticed a big difference in the amount of time I’ve cut down on general maintenance stuff, and with my blog, I’ve got the holy grail “be able to publish anything, quickly” that I wanted.
Something I missed? Hit the comments!

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This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> 6 steps to a better WordPress user experience

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Owning Your Content: A WordPress User’s Guide

I’ll admit, when I first heard the phrase ‘own your own content’, I thought it was a little unnecessary and slightly pretentious.

It was a couple of months ago, around the time Instagram made its now infamous change to its Terms of Service and my immediate reaction was “you really think you have Instagram photos worth selling?” But that wasn’t really the point people were making; it’s the principal that you should own the rights to your original content, no questions asked.

Hey, nice pic! I’ll be having that, thanks.

Whilst I was initially dismissive, I did my homework and started reading up around the subject, and when things like John Saddington’s Pressgram started, I figured if John was able to raise $50,000, he might at least have a valid point.

The tipping point for me came when I read about the recently-passed Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act, which essentially puts all of your photos into the public domain where you, the owner, are not immediately identifiable by either the photo’s metadata or a “diligent search” (which isn’t a legal term, so in practice probably means a quick Google).

From now on, then, I’m going to proactively move my content from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the like, and onto my own WordPress powered alternatives. Want to do the same? Here’s everything you need to know about owning your own content with WordPress.

Make publishing easy for yourself

The big advantage of using platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to share your content is that it’s easy. All of the major social platforms have easy-to-use mobile apps which let you share content instantly, and you essentially need to build your own system to compete with that ease of use.

Sadly short of building your own suite of apps, you’re not going to be able to entirely compete, but with some nifty IFTTT setups, you should be able to essentially build your own easy-to-use social setup.

Obviously for anything text based, you’ve got WordPress apps available for all sorts of mobile platforms, so it’s images which need the attention. I’m rocking an IFTTT recipe called DropPress which will take any images in a specific Dropbox folder and upload them as new photo posts to WordPress. With filters built into my Nexus’ default photo app, for me the publishing process is simple: snap a photo, edit as required and use Android’s “share” button to send to Dropbox.

For iPhone users I don’t think you’d be able to do that so easily, which is fortunately where the aforementioned Pressgram comes in; once it’s finished, it’ll let you snap a photo, add filters, title, caption and upload straight to WordPress. Neat, right? It’s all about making publishing your content as easy as possible, in a way that works for you, so try some stuff out and see what sticks.

Protect your images

So you’re hosting your own stuff on your own site, but what’s to stop someone from finding some of your pictures via Images Search, claiming there’s no context and thus that they’re unable to locate the owner? Nothing, actually! Arguably as your own site is going to be better set up for search engines, this is even more likely.

Thankfully, solutions are at hand! You have two options here: add copyright notices to the exif info of the images themselves or add a copyright notice to the actual image by way of a watermark. Both identify the files as yours, so with either in place your content should be appropriately protected.

Sadly, both options have their downsides. Editing exif information is fine if you run all of your photos through Photoshop anyway, but if you don’t, it doesn’t look like there’s an easy way to add said exif info to your files. For most people, this will just leave watermarking, which isn’t something that’s going to work for everyone; it’s a bit intrusive and almost feels unnecessary.

However, there are a bunch of plugins available which will automate your watermarking, and done discreetly, watermarks don’t have to look too bad. One of the best options seems top be the Transparent Image Watermark plugin, which lets you add a small and discreet transparent PNG to a bottom corner. It seems like a reasonable compromise.

License your content properly

Thus far I’ve focussed on the technical side of protecting your content, but that’s not all you can do; you also need to make sure it’s clear to real people visiting your site how they can/can’t use your content. This means two things: putting an actual license in place and making it obviously available.

Creative Commons licenses provide huge freedoms.

If you want to retain all control over your work, then a simple copyright notice in your footer will do the job. The correct format is “Copyright date by name of owner“. To make it extra clear, you might like to append that with a short notice telling the person the contents of this page are copyrighted… just in case they didn’t get the message first time. You may also like to ask them to contact you for information about how they can license your work for commercial usage — everything has its price, right?

If straight-out copyright isn’t right for you, you may want to look at the freedom-inducing Creative Commons licenses, which will allow potential users-of-your-work the freedoms you offer, ie commercial/non-commercial usage and yes/no to modifications. Whatever you go with, just make it very clear.

Time to do something

Sadly, your data and your content is on a slippery slope, and the sooner you take control, the better! It takes a little effort to start off with, but building something that’s convenient and works for you will make it well worth the time in the long run.

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This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> Owning Your Content: A WordPress User’s Guide

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Taking stock: how WPEngine triggered a revolution in WordPress hosting

WordPress hosting has seen a revolution over the last couple of years, with a huge shift away from cheap, crappy shared hosts and a move towards expensive, quality, managed hosting. In the space of three years, paying for quality hosting has become the norm, and for the firms at the forefront, it’s big business.

There’s a reason that managed hosting has been so successful — a lot of firms are offering brilliant services with everything you could need included and users are recognising there’s value in that. One such person is me; I made the switch to WP Engine late last year, and I’ve been very happy since.

As I said in a WPShout newsletter at the time, I immediately noticed things like loading speeds going down, causing a drop in the bounce rate and an increase in visits. Those are the kind of reasons why managed hosting is worth the price tag.

And so, with WP Engine hitting the headlines recently as it makes apparent moves towards gearing up towards making an IPO, I thought it’d be a good moment to take a look at its meteoric rise to the top of the pile in the WordPress hosting market, and see how they’ve served as a catalyst for everyone getting into managed hosting.

I’ll note quickly: I’m using affiliate links in this post because I genuinely really like WPEngine. I’d appreciate it if you used them, but don’t feel obliged to. I’m not being paid to write this… sadly.

Where it all began

For this post I’ve had the pleasure of sitting down via email with Austin Gunter, Engine’s “community manager guy” (my words, not his). Austin has done some very impressive work spreading WP Engine’s reach recently and is very well qualified to speak on behalf of the firm. We’ll get to it, then; I asked Austin where it all started out:

WP Engine started as the brainchild of Jason Cohen and Ben Metcalfe. Jason is a repeat entrepreneur and the author of a startup blog, ASmartBear.com, where he often would often get on HackerNews and see an influx of traffic. The blog was built on WordPress, of course, and Jason saw firsthand the need for a hosting company that could handle traffic spikes and also manage security concerns while providing amazing support.

I like this. Sadly I don’t get huge influxes of traffic from HackerNews or Reddit (yet!), but I’m pretty sure we’ve all been somewhere near there: someone influential tweets about or links to something you’ve posted, traffic spikes big time and instead of enjoying your largest-traffic day, you’re left with 40 second loading times and a whole bunch-full of missed opportunities.

So — WP Engine was built out of a need to provide hosting which didn’t buckle under the thought of lots of traffic, which is the kind of thing you want your host to do for you, really. Austin mentions Engine was “built around the idea that “hosting WordPress shouldn’t be so painful””, and you see that in some of the features on offer: a staging area (with the ability to push from staging to production), Git integration, auto-updates, actual WordPress support and so on.

It’s everything you want in a host, really. It’s approach which has been one of the reasons why Engine have grown so quickly, Austin says:

Listening to customers and responding quickly [has been important]. This means a lot of different things depending on the type of company, but for WP Engine it means the following. We listened early to the features that WordPress developers wanted, like auto updates, daily backups, and a staging area, and we built those. We knew that if we made it simple to build amazing sites on WP Engine, if we made developers and designers lives easier, we’d be able to grow.

Everybody’s doing it

As I mentioned up top, WP Engine have sparked a mini-revolution. Managed hosting is now something everyone wants to offer you. Whilst that’s less good for Engine, it’s awesome for us — the consumers. Fierce competition drives innovation and drives down prices, and whilst the competition is all very friendly, it’s often played out very publicly on Twitter, a trend driven by what I expect is a big% of customers being hugely active on the platform.

From a community management point of view, I’m not sure if that’s a blessing or a nightmare. I’ll go with “interesting challenge”; it’s certainly an interesting position to be in, where one tweet from one influential customer can make or break your day — or week. Austin mentioned how social media has played a big part in “spreading the word” about WP Engine:

Engagement on Social Media, specifically Twitter has also been huge. We’ve found that our customers really love being able to talk to us on social media. As well when prospective customers are evaluating whether or not to sign up for WP Engine, our established customers will respond before we can with their honest experience, which is usually pretty stellar! Of course, they wouldn’t support us so strongly if we didn’t work so hard to thrill them on the customer support side.

Austin — I’d be interested to see what Twitter search terms you monitor ;)

It’s a serious point, though; for WP Engine and its competitors, monitoring the social media conversation around the brand is vital, and being an effective part of that conversation is even more important. Social media engagement comes under the larger strategy of “community involvement”, and whilst it’s unfashionable to talk about “the WordPress Community”, it’s clearly a tangible, trackable thing for the Engine crew:

One of the keys for WP Engine has been to stay active as contributors to the Community. We attend 20-30 WordCamps a year, and sponsor meetups all over the country. Frankly, we’ve seen that the more we support the WordPress Community with our time and otherwise, the better our growth is. The Community values have been a foundation from the very beginning, but it’s really cool to be part of a company that exemplifies how you can “do well by doing good!”

Powering the future

Managed hosting isn’t for everyone, and it doesn’t try to be for everyone. I still have some of my sites on a shared hosting plan because for 100 visitors a month it’s not entirely cost-effective to use managed hosting. But for sites where it does matter, where security, uptime, load times and support are vital, managed hosting makes big sense.

Competition is driving a huge amount of growth and innovation, and as a customer, I’m really excited to see what’s next. Features like Engine’s new user portal which allows you to push from staging to production are actually genuinely useful, and I’m really excited to see what’s next.

So — thanks, guys, and if you’re in the market for a super-fast new host, check ‘em out.

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> Taking stock: how WPEngine triggered a revolution in WordPress hosting

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> One month on: does “pay what you want” work for WordPress themes?

Ever since I launched Empty Spaces last month as a free/pay-what-you-want theme, I’ve been asked repeatedly whether people are actually paying when they can just download the theme for free, and as an extension of that, whether “pay-what-you-want” actually works.

In this post I’m going to answer those two questions… or at least try to. Let’s get going.

So has anyone actually paid for your free theme?

Yes! I’ll run through some of the key data points from the first 26 days of Empty Spaces’ availability:

• Total downloads: 100.
• Paid downloads: 6.
• Range of amount paid: £1 to £10.
• Total revenue: £41.
• Most frequent price paid: £10.
• Total views of the download page: 300.
• And thus — conversion rate of visitors:downloads: 33%.

None of that is particularly ground-breaking stuff, but it’s certainly enough data to start drawing some conclusions. The first thing to notice is the conversion rate of visitors:downloads is very, very high indeed. One third of all people who came to the download page then went on to download the theme.

That’s huge.

A quick Google confirms my suspicions that even for free products, a conversion rate of around 5-15% is about normal. So why is the conversion rate so high? There’s a three part answer to this: first, I have no doubts that the system I’m using to manage sales/downloads, Gumroad, is responsible for a huge chunk of those downloads. It’s just an absolute pleasure to use. I’ve someone email me to tell me how much he enjoyed downloading the theme. That’s awesome.

To see why, head over to the Empty Spaces page on Shout and hit download. Gumroad overlays a super-simple secure download form, explaining what the product is and what you get if you purchase. Clicking “I want this” moves the overlay on to another screen, where you’re invited to input your email and name your price. If you enter nil as your price, you’re not asked for any card details and you can download straight away.

If you enter anything above zero, you’re asked for only the card detail needed to complete the purchase — just your card details and not pages of forms asking for your address, the name of your cat or who your best friend was in primary school. You can then download the theme immediately.

Gumroad is an absolutely brilliant payment system and I certainly attribute in part the conversion rate to Gumroad’s simplicity and ease-of-use.

Part two to the answer is the price… obviously. With the theme being free, if you’re not sure about it, there’s zero opportunity cost to just downloading it, and I suspect a lot of people have done just that. Have people downloaded it, tried it out, liked it and then come back to pay for it? No, not as far as I can tell.

And finally, part three: the figure I’ve quoted isn’t entirely accurate as it’s counting a mix of direct referrals from other sites and visitors via WPShout who are already on the Empty Spaces page. I had hoped this wouldn’t really be an issue, but where Empty Spaces has been included in “theme roundups”, often the Gumroad page has been directly linked, rather than the Shout article. In one case I even saw a “theme roundup” linking directly to a copy of the zip on the roundup site.

The conversion rate of visitors:downloads isn’t necessarily 33%, then, but because Gumroad can’t tell me in very much detail where visitors are coming from, and — because of hotlinking — not all downloads are even going through Gumroad, I can’t say how accurate that figure is. I would guess 25% +/- 5% would be accurate.

Okay, so… what does that mean? Does pay-what-you-want work?

Wooah, hang on! We’ve only looked at one aspect of this! I’ll run through some of the other bits of data quickly. With total revenue of £41, three people have paid £10, two people have paid £5 and one person has paid £1. What does this suggest? The payment of £1 is essentially a token payment; with Gumroad and card fees, I’m not sure I’ll actually see any of that. The other five payments are the ones to make note of, then, and they’re essentially indicating what people think the theme is worth to them.

If I was selling the theme with and wanted to put a lower-price bound on it, I’d go for £4.99, but — theme sellers take note — the “pay at least this amount” model does seem to work here, and people do seem to be happy to pay more for something when they perceive the value to be higher. You see the same thing on self-publishing music site Bandcamp, where they claim:

On name-your-price albums, fans pay an average of 50% more than the minimum.

So, I’ll finally answer the question: does pay-what-you-want work? The answer — yes, absolutely… for me, in these specific circumstances. I’ve let people to pay for a product I was going to just release for free, and offered no real incentive to pay. Support is included for both free and paying users in the form of a documentation file and dead-simple usage. If and when updates are needed, as I built the theme for myself and still use it, they’ll be available for all. What I’ve essentially done is prove people are willing to pay for something if they perceive it has value.

Does that mean pay-what-you-want is going to work for others, then? Not particularly, I don’t think. Certainly offering a themes with a minimum price is something that I’d recommend looking into, but I don’t imagine even that would work once the the price goes above £20.

Whilst I’ve shown here that some people will pay for something when they don’t have to, what I’ve also shown overwhelmingly is that people like free things. If you make your product available for free, 9/10 — or 94/100 in my case — people will take the free option. If you’re trying to sell WordPress themes to make money, this isn’t really going to work.

If your product is something you would have otherwise given away — and still want to do so — then pay-what-you-want doesn’t do any harm. I’m particularly thinking of free plugins here; through something like Gumroad you’ve essentially got a much more effective donate button.

It’s been a very interesting experiment, though, and something I would quite like to do again. The take home lesson is this really isn’t something for everyone, though. Thanks for reading; after all that if you want to check out Empty Spaces, you can do so here ;)

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Many thanks to SliderVilla for powering this post! SliderVilla host 8+ premium WordPress Slider plugins with different designs and layouts. Shout doesn’t have any other ads; if you’d like to support the site, please get in touch!

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> One month on: does “pay what you want” work for WordPress themes?

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> The Economic Theory Of Selling WordPress Themes

As you’ll know if you’ve read my recent post, I find practical applications of economic theory quite an interesting topic.

With the topic of WordPress theme pricing coming up again this week on WPCandy, with WPZOOM co-founder Dumitru Brinzan’s announcing the launch of his $200/theme niche theme shop, Hermes Themes, and what with my ongoing experiment in WordPress theme pricing with my free/pay-what-you-want theme, Empty Spaces (check it out!), I thought it’d be interesting to get the Economics textbooks back out and look at the actual theory behind how WordPress themes are priced.

This post aims to look at two things: why WordPress themes are priced how they are, and what changes could be made to that pricing in order to generate higher profits for those making the themes.

There’s a little bit of economics you’ll need to understand, but I’m fairly confident I’ve explained this clearly. If you’re ready, then, let’s get to it!

Stagnating pricing

As far as I can tell the price of a WordPress theme hasn’t really changed much in the five or six years premium theme shops have been around.

This is odd for two reasons: first, you’d expect with the vast increase in the quantity of WordPress themes being sold, there should be a correlating decrease in price due to increased competition.

Second, WordPress themes have become immensely more complicated in the last five years, and the time you had to put in to turn a top quality theme in 2008 nowhere near reflects the time one needs to put in now to turn out a product of the same quality.

So what would one expect to have happened? The price of a WordPress theme should have been fluctuating, reflecting the market conditions of quantity of competing products and the cost of producing the WordPress theme.

In practical terms, it would seem prices should’ve fallen between 2008 and 2010, with those prices climbing back up 2010-2011 and 2012 to the present seeing a plateau. This reflects very general market conditions of rapid expansion in supply early on, followed by heavy development time as theme businesses fought to become sustainable, and most recently the establishment – and rewards gained from – economies of scale.

Let’s stick that on a graph. This is simple economics: increased competition and supply drives prices down; prices are then rising as product differentiation and economies of scale establish strongholds in the market. Continued competition ensures prices do not rise too far.

But… I don’t really think this has happened, though. Whilst you can get a theme on ThemeForest for $30, WooThemes will still happily sell you a theme for $70. Let’s take a look at why this hasn’t happened.

Not all themes are equal

My lovely graph, based on lovely sound economic theory isn’t correct as it makes the fundamentally flawed assumption that all WordPress themes are equal products.

You knew that, right? It’s obvious — I’m not even talking in “quality” terms; if I want an “acadmenic” theme, then the latest magazine theme from ThemeForest isn’t a product I’m going to consider. If I want a portfolio theme then I’m not going to look at Woo’s latest e-Commerce design.

Thus, prices haven’t fallen because whilst overall the supply of WordPress themes has increased, the supply of directly-comparable WordPress themes has not increased on anywhere near the same scale.

This explains why the average price of a “magazine theme” is likely around $40, whereas as “premium framework” will set you back $60+. There are vastly more magazine themes to choose from, which has driven prices down.

The economics is working, just on a much smaller scale.

Revenue maximisation

Now we know why prices are at the levels they are, let’s look at the theory behind the question everybody selling themes wants to know the answer to: will I make more money selling more themes at a lower price, or selling fewer themes at a higher price?

I should note, I don’t have the actual answer, but I can explain to you the theory which will allow you, dear theme shop owner, to find the answer yourself.

If you plot a graph of price against revenue, you generally find the results are normally distributed — ie you get a bell curve — and if you start with the highest possible price, you’ll see as price decreases revenue increases from higher sales, up to a point at which despite higher sales, the low price means revenue decreases.

It’s everyone product seller’s dream to be at the very top of this curve, a point which is known as the revenue maximsing point. Such named because it’s the point at which you have highest revenue. Economists are imaginative, eh?

One should note for WordPress themes, the profit maximsing point may be slightly either side of the revenue max point as support costs don’t directly scale, but it shouldn’t be very far either side of this point, to the point we’ll assume it’s virtually the same.

If you put all of that into another nice graph, it looks like this:

Looking at the prices, it’s fairly easy to see the revenue maximising point is around $50 -$70 for your average WordPress theme. That’s around the standard price of a WordPress theme, so it would seem everyone’s got their pricing right and the free-market has done its job.

Costs that don’t scale

However, the theme market may have just one last twist in store for us: the assumption that the revenue maximising point is close to the profit maximising point could well be entirely flawed.

There’s various bits of anecdotal evidence around to suggest support costs are actually huge. WooThemes’ recent switch to one-year-only support for new customers was a move cited as a result of spiralling support costs. Hermes Themes’ announcement that themes were going to be priced at $200 cited the cost of support. From my own experiences as a theme-shop “support expert”, I can certainly believe support costs can eat up around 1/3 to 1/2 of revenue.

If that’s the case, then profit may be higher from the selling of fewer themes to fewer people at a higher price.

Let’s look at that same graph again, just with profit maximisation marked on too:

As a good capitalist, you should be interested in the blue line, which shows profit. What does the graph show? Profit is highest when selling themes at around $95 and — more significantly — the modal (most common) price of $50 actually makes vastly less profit.

The graph is saying that you’d definitely make much more money (that you can keep!) from selling fewer themes at a higher price. Selling a higher quantity of themes at a lower price looks like it’s actually a really bad idea.

I should note these figures are entirely made up and I have designed them to give the results I want. However, I believe these are roughly the figures you’d get if this was tried as a proper experiment.

Innovation… in pricing

I hope, then, that this has been food for thought. I was prompted to write this by looking at the stats from my new free/pay-what-you-want theme, Empty Spaces. If you haven’t seen It yet, please check it out! The more people that look at it, the better the data I’ll have when I write up the results in a couple of weeks :)

The economics in this post is a bit rough around the edges and is there to prove a point rather than illustrate outstanding economic theory. If I’ve got something wrong or something needs better explanation, let me know — leave a comment below!

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Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Free “Personal” WordPress Theme: Empty Spaces

I’m very excited to announce the release of an all-new free “personal” WordPress theme, Empty Spaces. It’s single-column, responsive, media rich and pretty damn well suited for simple, personal blogs.

I’ve been using Empty Spaces on my blog, sevenironcows.com, since the start of the year and so far it’s served me very well. It’s simple, yet still interesting and allows you to focus on your content, whilst expanding the narrative through big, bold images.

As is more-or-less a necessity, it’s responsive so your carefully crafted content is readable wherever you go. Even all those images squeeze nicely down to mobile or tablet size.

Media that just works

One of my favourite things about Empty Spaces is that whilst one of the big draws are the huge images at the top of each post which shift from greyscale into full colour when hovered over on the homepage, or display in colour by default on single posts, the whole thing just works automagically. Just drop your images in and it works; no set up required.

Colour fades in when a story is hovered-over on the homepage.

Via the quick installation of a very simple plugin, you can replace those lovely featured images with lovely featured videos instead.

A little bit of info on that — obviously the images at the top of each post are featured images. WordPress knows to automatically resize these to a maximum width of 880px and some CSS3 handles making the images greyscale. On mobile, a max-width of 100% ensures the images go mobile out of the box, although I’d recommend installing something like Adaptive Images to reduce the workload on mobile.

Want to use images instead of video? The functionally named “replace featured images with video” plugin has got that covered for you. Empty Spaces is compatible out the box (and looks pretty awesome with featured videos, too).

Custom post formats

What I’ve not actually mentioned up to this point is that Empty Spaces is a child theme of the current default WordPress theme, Twenty Twelve. In practical terms, this isn’t really relevant; you just need to know it means Empty Spaces inherits solid code and some handy features, such as post formats. When you’re writing a post, as with Twenty Twelve, you’ve got the option to publish as any of the following:

• Standard
• Aside
• Image
• Link
• Quote
• Status

Support for post formats is one of my favourite things about Empty Spaces; it just makes it flexible. This thing can take any sort of content you want to throw at it.

Widgetised header; custom header

Adding to its flexibility, Empty Spaces has various options for its header, supporting custom menus, custom header images and a simple widgetised header area. On sevenironcows.com I’ve used a simple text widget to show a bio, which makes a good fit, but do whatever you please here — or just leave it blank.

Right at the top, that’s your blog title and description, followed by a standard custom menu which is drop-down enabled and will collapse into a nice button on mobile devices.

Simple, light, functional

Empty Spaces is a pretty cool theme. I’ve been using it for two months now, tweaking here and there and I’m now at the stage where I’m very happy with how it’s turned out — which is why I’m giving it away to you. It’d be selfish to keep it to myself, right?

Documentation for Empty Spaces can be found here, and is also included in the zip download.

Empty Spaces is a bit of an experiment for me, in that the download is “pay what you want”, with no minimum price. That means if you’d like to download it for free, you can just enter 0 as the price you’d like to pay and download it right away. If you think it’s worth a little of your hard-earned cash, I’d gratefully welcome any contributions.

The theme is licensed under the GPL, so take it and do more or less what you want with it. If you do end up using it, I’d be very interested to see how you’ve used it :)

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Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> An Economist’s Look: Competition in the WordPress Theme Marketplace

I was doing some writing for Siobhan recently, and one of the topics I was covering was WordPress theme shops, and the economy that’s built up around them.

As a former Economics student, I got thinking about how the Premium Theme marketplace has built up from those early days of Revolution Themes over the last couple of years; how the market is structured and what that market structure means for consumers.

That thought process has lead me to this post, where I’m going to run you through the current state of the marketplace, what impact that has and what that means for consumers.

Before we start, a little bit of Economics background: we’ll be looking at things like barriers to entry, which are just any elements of the market which make entry by new businesses difficult, economies of scale which are benefits enjoyed by larger businesses and the aforementioned market structures which is, well, how the market is structured.

Those structures might be things like a monopoly, oligopoly or perfect competition. Take note of these fancy words, we’ll be using them again later!

Anyone can make a website, right?

At a glance the structure of the theme marketplace looks pretty straightforward: anyone can set up a website, so barriers to entry are nil, economies of scale don’t really exist because of tools like PayPal and that makes the whole marketplace perfectly competitive.

Unfortunately, I’d like to make the case that this isn’t true. You only have to look at WP Daily to see the huge number of theme marketplaces which crop up every week… only to shut their doors again a couple of months later.

There has to be some economic reason for this; I can’t be that 50% of new theme shops are just rubbish (well, it could but we’ll assume it’s not). Once you start looking at those reasons, it paints a slightly less bright picture of the Premium Theme marketplace, where the established players start looking like oligopolists (what’s that?).

Let’s take a closer look at the things which would prevent me from setting up a theme shop right now.

Barriers to entry

Okay, so let’s take a look at these magical barriers. The unique cross-border nature of the marketplace means there’s virtually no formal regulation, and no regulator, but that doesn’t mean barriers don’t exist.

There are two main barriers to entering the theme marketplace: economies of scale and reach establishment. The first is fairly straightforward to get your head around: it’s obvious that WooThemes can make better themes than you can because they have structures such as their WooFramework, their entire website, checkout, documentation and support systems in place already.

They’re set up to be scaleable and you’re…. well your not set up at all, actually. This doesn’t have to be a huge sticking point; you could create your own framework or use somebody else’s and set up your own website relatively quickly. It’s a barrier, though, and it’s certainly something that would put off potential entrants.

The big barrier, though, is what we’re going to call “reach establishment”. This is a couple of things such as established search positions, partnerships and existing customers, but simply — the largest theme houses have hundreds of thousands or even millions of visitors coming to their site every month. You could create a much better quality product than your established competitiors, but you’ll have trouble selling it if nobody visits your site.

Enter the pre-built marketplace

It’s here that we should mention ThemeForest, and hopefully this will go some way to show you why ThemeForest is so successful and what makes authors attracted to it. ThemeForest essentially removes the barriers to entry for you. You just need to create the product and they’ll stick it on their economies of scale and put it in front of millions of potential customers. They’ll take a cut of your sales, yes, but I’d rather have 65% of $10,000 of sales rather than 100% of $10 of sales.

Follow this through and it goes some way to explain the varying quality of themes found on ThemeForest. It’s not rocket science that if you make it easier for people to enter the marketplace, the quality will suffer as a result. On a site by itself, a mediocre quality product simply wouldn’t survive. On ThemeForest, though, alongside other better quality products, the mediocre product can survive.

Other marketplaces? Until they can compete with ThemeForest’s reach, they can’t compete with ThemeForest. For the sake of consumer choice, I hope someone does start to compete; pre-built marketplaces provide an import role in the WordPress economy by vastly reducing the barriers to entry.

Community expands consumer choice

The big thing we’ve not looked at yet is consumer choice. That is, say I want to buy a new theme for my website; how do I know which theme to buy?

Unfortunately, most consumers aren’t in anywhere near a position to judge what makes a theme “good”. You, reading this, probably have some idea what you need to look out for, but with the exponential increase in WordPress’ popularity, people like friend Joan who phones you every time her printer jams have tried to set up their own websites.

Joan has literally no idea what makes a theme good, other than whether or not on the theme’s sales page it has a large box which says “search engines” ticked. Joan wants her site on search engines.

Consumers need educating!

This is a long-winded way of making a simple point: if we as the WordPress community want the quality of themes to increase, we need to tell people what makes a good theme in the first place. That’s pretty much it. Consumers can’t make informed decisions if they aren’t informed.

What happens now

It’s in pretty much everyone’s interests to see themes continue to innovate and increased competition is the major way that that’s going to continue to happen. So what happens now? I’ve not really touched on the position of the major theme shops, but the tl;dr is they’re pretty secure and aren’t going anywhere. The barriers to entry I keep on going on about means short term it’d actually be quite hard to mess anything up. People are going to keep coming to their sites and they’re going to continue to sell themes. Simple.

But new entrants to the market? I can’t actually remember anyone who’s broken into the marketplace and become an established site in the last year or two, and that’s not going to change. Have people started selling themes on ThemeForest relatively recently and ended up becoming successful there, though? Yep, and there’s no reason that going to change any time soon.

ThemeForest provides a unique way around the barriers to entry in the market, and in doing so actually provides a huge service to the WordPress community. It’s in everyone’s interest, then, that ThemeForest itself maximises freedoms of sellers and in doing so, consumers.

It’s also in everyone’s interest that the community makes an effort to educate consumers, so they’re able to make informed decisions about which themes work best for them.

And finally, it’s in everyone’s interest to support people entering the marketplace with new and innovative ideas. The next time there’s WP Daily post announcing an awesome new theme shop launching, I don’t want to find out a couple of months later that it’s died.

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> An Economist’s Look: Competition in the WordPress Theme Marketplace

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Screencast: Responsive Design Made Easy

I’ve written about responsive design here on WPShout before, but I don’t think I emphasised just how easy it is to do.

In this, the first screencast I’ve done here on WPShout for about two or three years, I take you through the very simple steps required to make your WordPress theme responsive.

I recorded this video because I needed to actually do this, and it’s such an easy process, it made sense to start recording! In the video I was working on my “personal” blog, sevenironcows.com, as well as heather.in. Check them out!

For examples of all the code used, check out this tutorial.

Any feedback on the screencast, let me know; if this one works, I’ll do more in the future :)

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> Screencast: Responsive Design Made Easy

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> “Blogging Tips”… With A Twist: Introducing BlogBettr

Ever since I started blogging, nearly four years ago now, I’ve been fascinated with tracking analytics, tweaking copy and working out how changing little things impacts the “success” of that post.

Here on WPShout I’ve started making little changes here and there and through posts like Effective Landing Pages and my last post here I’ve started to share those techniques, tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way.

It’s clear, though, from the analytics I’ve been tracking so religiously, that not everyone’s too interested in these fascinating discoveries I’m making.

This is entirely understandable; everyone knows you don’t make a successful blog by mixing niches and topics and you, dear reader, follow WPShout because you’re interested in WordPress and not because you’re interested in minor analytical breakthroughs.

The time has come, then, for me to branch out, widen my horizons! My recent attempts to mould WPShout’s content towards the-science-of-blogging haven’t really worked and it makes sense to split this content onto a new site and let WPShout be properly about WordPress.

Introducing BlogBettr

I’m very excited, then, to announce the launch of BlogBettr!

It’d be easy to put the site in the “blogging tips” niche, but that’d be over-simplifying it; whilst — yes — the site will help you make your blog better, a lot of the content I’ve got drafted is about taking a scientific and analytical approach to copywriting and marketing and then applying that to a blogging context.

That all sounds like a mouthful, but trust me — it’ll make sense when you see the content.

The first post on BlogBettr is a great one: How To Customize Your WordPress Theme.

It’s the very basics, but (hopefully) it’s going to help quite a few people and it allows me to keep a clear distinction between my content there and my content here; WPShout is super-cool WordPress stuff and when BlogBettr covers WordPress, it won’t assume any prior knowledge.

Coming soon!

That’s my new site, then! I’d appreciate it if you checked it out. If it’s not your cup of tea, well, that’s why I created a new site so I can carry on posting WordPress related stuff here.

I’ve got some great stuff lined up for WPShout over the next couple of weeks, including some screencasts, so look out for those in the near future.

My new “personal” blog, sevenironcows.com!

You might also want to check out my new personal blog, sevenironcows.com, which I’m going to be updating at least once a week during 2013. Alternatively, just follow me on Twitter and get updates about all my crazy goings-on. See you around, folks :)

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> “Blogging Tips”… With A Twist: Introducing BlogBettr

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Your Blog’s Content Is Irrelevant To Its Success

Last week I friend of mine who’s a mathematician was helping me out with a formula I was trying to create which could predict how successful a post from a brand page on Facebook was going to be.

We worked for a couple of hours on what I had already and he changed it around a little and added some distributions I didn’t really understand, but by the time we were done we had a formula which we thought would do the trick.

Ah, but how effective are their posts?

We ran a couple of randomly selected posts through the formula and… yep, as we’d hoped, it was working pretty much perfectly and scoring the posts on a scale of 0 – 100, with 0 being the least successful post possible and 100 being wildly successful.

The results weren’t quite right, though; posts which (subjectively) were really good weren’t being rewarded and equally, posts which weren’t so good weren’t being penalised.

But here’s the thing: even when we added in a variable to account for the subjective quality of a post, it only accounted for roughly 7% of the total score. What does that mean in practical terms? Well, it means the actual content of a Facebook post is virtually irrelevant to the success of the post.

This is, of course, only true in specific circumstances, but those circumstances cast a pretty wide net: the principle applies to most, if not all brand pages on Facebook. Sure, the formatting of the post is hugely important — and the formula accounted for that as such — but the actual content? Not such a big deal.

Is it who you are rather than what you know?

So why am I telling you any of this on a blog about WordPress?

Well, let’s take a look at what makes a blog post successful:

1. High quality, well versed content.
2. Discussion driven from the engaging content.
3. Sharing driven from discussion.

In a fluffy, ideal world, that’d be the answer. In practice? In my experience it looks a bit more like this:

1. Short, catchy title, either controversial or simply helpful.
2. Carefully edited copy which is easy to scan, punctuated with relevant, captioned images.
3. Social media sharing buttons readily to hand with calls to action where appropriate.
4. Calling in favours with influential friends.

We are never ever… reading that much text. Please just post about cat pictures instead.

I’m now going to go back on my claim in the title of this post that the content of your blog’s posts is entirely irrelevant (I only said that to tick the “controversial title” box, see) as I think that’s going just a little bit too far, but the point I’m trying to make is still valid.

If you’re just blogging for fun or for yourself, then of course this isn’t such a big concern, but where capturing readers, pageviews or revenue is involved, this stuff’s important. There’s more to writing engaging content than just writing engaging content. There’s a difference between writing and writing for the web.

If your readers are typical tech-types, it’s likely they’ll want easily-digestible content, so make sure you break up your content by adding in lots of paragraph breaks and images. I’m guessing here, but I imagine an older, less tech-inclined audience would be much happier reading longer-form content. Work out who your audience is and adapt your content appropriately.

Note how on Copyblogger the copy is broken up into bite-size chunks.

A couple of weeks ago CopyBlogger posted “the 5 most persuasive words in the English language“. A lot of the claims were backed up with real data from real people and real tests and it’s things like this which are, to me at least, hugely important.

If you can start working out what it is that makes people engage with your content, then you can start writing content that’s engaging people because of how you’re writing, not what you’re writing. As you start doing that and thinking consciously about your writing and going back and editing it, you’ll end up with better quality content.

Going back to my original Facebook example, it’s much easier to measure very specific variables when you’ve only got a small amount of content. In a seven hundred word blog post, it’s a little bit harder and as such I’ve not seen too much research on the topic.

So what do you think, folks? If you’ve got thoughts or know of some research, let me know below in the comments; I’d like to discuss this one. Also, you should follow me on Twitter.

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> Your Blog’s Content Is Irrelevant To Its Success