Recently there’s been a lot of (mis) information around about “how to start your own premium WordPress themes site”.
They make all make it sound fairly easy.
Just make a design, hack it into a WordPress theme, buckle on a zillion theme options using the old Woo options panel and you have yourself a wonderful theme that’ll make you rich.
It’s a lot harder than you think to make a good, respectable theme; only about 10% of premium themes are actually any good.
“Good”, being a theme that’s well built, well supported and follows best practises. I’m of the view that the vast majority of themes don’t do this. Don’t let your new site join the ranks of other mediocre themes, follow my handy guide and you’ll be flying in no time.
1,000 options will be Game Over for your database, why would anyone need so many options and if you do this at least offer a reset button so you don’t have to go and clean out all the junk from your database.
Having been introduced to WP and Themes quite recently all I can say is they are both excellent for those of us with limited skills.
With a minimum of effort one can put up a very acceptable site because of the support and efforts of those who know more.
Many thanks to all those who do so much unacknowledged
Thanks for the tips Alex. Great post.
Very good tips on selling wordpress themes. I am looking to start my marketplace soon also.
Great Post, Here is my 2 cents. Don’t copy everybody else. Focus on specific niche, if you design themes for everybody then you will fail, because there is millions of them already for free. Be different and unique, and remember less is more…
Marios
The most important one is definitely to not duplicate WordPress functionality I see this over and over again. Like being able to enter page id’s to exclude them or not taking advantage of the “featured image” functionality.
Great post.
Oh yea, and 1,000 options – Game Over for your database – And if you do this at least offer a reset button so you don’t have to go and clean out all the junk from your database.
For anyone reading this in 2013+. A good way to battle this is before saving the theme options, you merge them all together in a single array and then save this array. Then you only have 1 saved option in the database 🙂
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Great post, Alex! Super useful to those starting out as well as the experienced WP developers!
Hi and thanks for this post. I’m currently busy with an options page whereby there are many featuresw that can be setup. I have tried my best to keep the features to a minimum, but that is no easy task.
I currecntly use the options page on my blog and I’m very happy with the results.
Great article Alex. I’ll be referring back to this piece, very useful. Thanks Pam
Nice tips. I don’t know if it only me but all the images are floating to the right and out of the border. I’m not sure if it’s intended but it look kinda of unsightly.
Maybe you want to rectify it? Thanks.
Thanks for linking to my Cool Blue theme. Believe it or not, people actually do appreciate themes without theme options whatsoever.
Most of the time the options (like Analytics, FeedBurner, etc.) can be duplicated by an existing plugin and other options would be better off (not to mention more flexible) as a custom widget.
Great tips again Alex. Bookmarked.
I like the background and the transparency. 🙂
Thanks Amor 🙂
I agree with what you say about options page. Very often it is totally useless.
Besides being a best practice to not require plugins, I believe the biggest factor driving required plugins out of themes is the built-in WordPress theme uploader. Most end users won’t unzip the themes to see if any plugins are included. The uploader makes packaging plugins with a theme difficult and impractical.
The simple answer is don’t do it/you shouldn’t be doing it. Plugins can be built into themes (which they should be if they’re required for the theme to run) and if they’re optional, let the user install the plugin at their own leisure.
Good post Alex.
I have always been a strong believer that themes should not rely on plugins to work. It was very common a few years ago but isn’t as bad anymore.
The problem is: when a plugin stops working or stops being supported, your theme is worthless. Why tie the success of your theme to someone elses work.
kevin
Absolutely, glad someone else agrees 🙂
Could not agree more with you Kevin… a perfect example is the Featured Content Gallery which we used to package with our themes at StudioPress. It became quite obvious that the plugin wasn’t being supported, so one of our moderators developed a better version of the plugin which we now include. This way we know on our forum, if there are any questions about it, he’s there to help.
A Wptheme should run with least plugins and minimum customization required for blog owners, sometime it takes lots of pain to restructure installation to suit new theme, instead theme should suit to installed one.