WP News Theme Update and Matt Mullenweg’s views on Premium WordPress Themes
March 8th, 2008 under Wordpress
In this article, I’ll be giving you an update with the progress I’ve been making for my premium WordPress theme as well as Matt Mullenweg’s views on Premium WordPress Themes and what he thinks about it. Premium theme authors be ready for a sight change in business models.
WP News Theme
In the previous article for this project, I learned a lot about how popular news websites like CNN for example, displayed key features and elements that make their news website, a news website.
Throughout the weeks, I’ve been learning a lot about the whole news/magazine layout style. I’ve been reading a lot of blogs and listening to a few podcasts talking about the trends and state of current themes.
I also went to the source, reading actual news papers (the Sunday news paper to be exact) and magazines (Computer Arts and a few others) to get a feel for how things are presented and the flow of articles. But then again, I only considered it with a grain of salt because I had to take into account that it was formatted for that type of medium and not for an actual websites. So the fun part in this task is to translate those elements digitally for the theme.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll probably notice that I’ve been going through a lot of planning and brainstorming for this theme. Call it me being a perfectionist (which I am), but I like having a solid framework to build this theme upon if you catch my gist.
To make things more complicated, there’s also the topic about premium wordpress themes. My opinion on that? Well simple, I think that for an theme author to truly provide a premium theme, it should excel in design flexibility, functionality and support, because that’s what you’re paying for; continuous support, enhancements and features. But not everyone can live up to those standards.
Matt’s views on Premium WordPress Themes
To end the endless debate on premium themes and to stop following everyone’s subjective views (not that their bad but), why not just ask the creator of WordPress himself?
That’s what I did. I recently got a chance to speak with Matt Mullenweg at FOWA and I totally took advantage of that opportunity. The initially idea of talking to him about premium themes didn’t catch on and I originally thought of just introducing myself and telling him how much I love working with WordPress. My first thoughts on premium themes appeared when I meet up with Mike and Alain that day while we were talking about our stuff which spark up a lot of other questions I could ask too, which I did.
After thinking about it, I didn’t really know his opinion on the whole premium thing and the thought of getting his opinion on the matter would really reinforce the work I’m putting into creating my themes.
In a nutshell, Matt said that he didn’t like where premium WordPress themes are going. I was a little shocked! I didn’t want to start a business off of selling WordPress themes if the creator didn’t approve of it; especially after I’ve talked with him in person that would just be outright insulting. I had to know why…
So I ask him why and he explained to us (Mike, Alain, and I) that the current state of selling WordPress themes aren’t helping the community grow, which defeats the purpose of WordPress being open source. How are other theme authors going to learn from your themes if you’re only giving them an option to buy them? Good point since WordPress is in fact, open source. Matt’s a big advocate on that. Anyway, I wanted to counter that idea and bring up the fact that premium theme authors do provide free themes, but after thinking about it, I think I see what he’s trying to say.
So I asked him, is there any way that premium theme authors can compromise and have it so both the community and authors benefit from their themes? He said look at his business model with WordPress.com. You can sign up for your own blog up in minutes and if a user wants more control, wants extra features, they can pay a small fee for it.
Example: Want more control over the CSS, pay 15 credits (1 credit = $1) or 0.04 cents a day. Need more space? Pay up to 90 credits or 0.25 per day. And so on. How can this model work with WordPress themes? Well I’m thinking that maybe you can provide themes for free, and if users want more functionality, they can pay a small fee for each individual feature. Sounds like the making of Premium WordPress Plugins to me. I don’t think this approach would appeal to theme designers too much so I kept thinking of other ways…
But that was just a suggestion he threw out. Ultimately (if I understood him correctly) it doesn’t matter how you do it, just as long as you’re helping the community in the advancements your making (i.e. want to learn how shifter works? Nope. You’ve got to pay for it first). Keeping the open source mentality while still finding ways to profit off of your work is the question he left me with.
After that interesting conversation, I thought about that question in the back of my mind the whole time throughout the conference trying to figure out ways I could go about taking his approach. It was a challenging question but it all came down to sharing the advancements while still profiting off the work.
While I’m still unsure about it, I think I found a way I could pull this off; having the community benefit from my themes while still being able to make a profit off the many hours of work I put into it.
It seems like I have to cater to two different audiences:
- People who know how to edit, modify, or code WordPress themes
(think: Web designers, developers, and DIYs) - People who just use WordPress as a blogging/cms platform and don’t know any technical stuff about it
Not to say that the current state of premium themes is corrupted; but for the future of WordPress themes (since we’ve been talking about that a lot recently), try to help others in the community with the advancements as a premium theme author. I know this may sound difficult, but with a little creativity, you’ll be able to help WordPress advance while still making the profit you deserve.
Doing some quick googling, I found 101 Ways to Make Money off Open Source and How to make money from Open source just to get you started if your interested.
Finally, the current state of selling premium WordPress themes aren’t wrong by any means. Matt doesn’t really want to stop you from doing what your doing, I’m just telling you what he told me and providing a few alternatives.
Now back to WP News Theme:
Enough planning already! It’s time to get things started. Initially, I stated that I’d have a basic working version up and running in a month. After doing all this research, finishing up a few projects, waiting for WordPress 2.5 to be officially released in two days and speaking with Matt, it seems like I might have to extend that deadline or maybe change it into something else like having a mockup ready by then. We’ll see.
In the next article for WP News Theme; I’ll tell you about the feature set and show a little preview of how the theme’s going to actually look. Hopefully I’ll be getting a few Ooow’s and Aaah’s as well.
P.S. Mike, Alain, and I also talked with Matt about what’s going on with the WP Marketplace and a quick comment on Small Potato’s 5 dollar themes club. I’ll talk about that after I finish up BloggingTips’ redesign which is what the next article is all about.
March 8th, 2008 at 1:20 am
On Matt’s opinion: Very interesting. I sorta expected as much. Can’t wait to hear the rest (and see your design comps!).
… and I promise to stop talking about the future for a while. Really!
March 8th, 2008 at 1:27 am
@Ian Stewart: Haha, there’s nothing wrong with talking about the future. It’s always good to have some kind of prediction set so theres something to talk about lol.
March 8th, 2008 at 6:02 am
Hey, awesome to hear that you download and listen to the show. I wish I could of had you on when I did the episode that was all about themes. If I do another roundtable discussion about wordpress themes, I’ll be sure to contact you.
As for you chat with Matt, I too was surprised to see him say that he didn’t like where premium themes were headed. But after his explanation, I think I get his drift. You also brought forth the question that I had in my mind while reading the post, and that was, “Keeping the open source mentality while still finding ways to profit off of your work”.
What an interesting conundrum. It seems to me that it would be counter intuitive for a premium theme author to describe how they accomplished something within one of their themes so that someone else could take that feature and implement it into a free version. I believe that to be one of the main reasons for this not already taking place.
I for one would not like to see a new market open up for Premium WordPress plugins but, we are already starting to see many Plugin authors go the route of taking money and then offering support. Doesn’t sound like the market is that far away from the plugin stand point.
Interesting post by far and I think I’ll add this blog to my feedreader. Also, please try to stop by the live show and participate in the chat room or by calling in. Would love to you have you on.
March 8th, 2008 at 6:26 am
Essentially I’m not surprised by Matt’s response either - simply because I know he is a big advocate of open source (which I too am a big supporter of). But as someone that has been profiting from premium themes, I don’t see why I shouldn’t charge $100 for a quality theme and sell it to many people, compared to your A-list designers that charge $10000 USD for the same WP theme when doing it for a big client… How is the A-list designer (again using WordPress to profit) contributing to the community? Mmmm… I think I just have too much to say about this, that this will have to turn into a complete blog post…
March 8th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Intriguing.
You were wise to ask Matt about this. In fact, I’m sort of surprised it hasn’t come up in a manner like this already.
I don’t find anything wrong with Premium themes, I’m just somewhat surprised at their popularity. I mean, to me, they don’t really offer much of a benefit to most users, or am I missing something?
March 8th, 2008 at 11:07 am
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March 8th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Interesting post. I think that Matt’s post of view is not very surprising when you take into account his position in Automattic.
He has mentioned his views on premium themes a while ago, in terms of integrating them into an official marketplace for .com bloggers for a 50% cut, and allowing self-hosted bloggers to use them for free via the GPL licensing. Theme designers who operate outside of that arrangement are naturally not going to be approved of by Automattic.
Many Premium Themes use custom fields, which aren’t available for wordpress.com blogs, so it really could be difficult to provide similar functionality for those users.
By the way, does any one know if/when this marketplace will materialise?
March 8th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
@Jeffro2pt0: dude I been listening to your podcast for a while, its full of great content! I wouldn’t mind participating on the show, I’ll just need to get my skype setup correctly and I’ll be good to go.
Your point sounds very interesting about describing how theme authors accomplished something within one of their themes. That sounds like a good compromise.
If I’m not busy @work next week, I’ll be sure to call in and say a few words or at least participate in the chat room. Thanks
@Adii: I completely understand where you’re coming from as for I’ve seen that kind of stuff going on a lot outside the wp community.
The good thing is that the difference between those supposably “A-listers” and you is the fact that you support open source so it wouldn’t be as tempting to do something like that.
As far as charging 100 dollars per theme, again, there’s nothing wrong with putting that kind of price on your work, and you don’t have to feel guilty about it. Maybe doing something like Jeffro said above and kind of tell your readers how you do curtain stuff in your themes, kinda giving them more insight on how you make your themes. Again, I don’t think something like that should be too hard for you since you’re already very open with your business as is. But try out different things though, there’s no deadline or anything like that.
@PJ: Matt didn’t tell us any specific date for when the marketplace was going to launch, but I wouldn’t be surprise if it was anytime this year.
March 8th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Interesting post.
My question in mind is, what would happen if you sell premium themes with special features, but you’d also write articles explaining how to create such and such feature?
I guess that would actually be beneficial still to the theme author. Sure, fellow author might “steal” your technique, but any good coder should be able to imitate a feature just by seeing it in action anyway. Might as well open up and start a conversation about it, right? That way everyone can learn and contribute.
Also, I don’t have any statistics, but I think people who buy themes aren’t those who would cancel their purchase and start coding up their own theme anyway (not all people have the technical skill, experience, or time). So I don’t think the articles will affect the theme’s market negatively. In fact, the articles could only give us more buzz about our theme, exposing us to more potential customers.
Aren’t open source great?
March 8th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
@Hafiz Rahman: Yup, that’s exactly what jeffro was saying.
Might as well write about how you did it since any decent coder can figure it out anyway. They might even try to claim that they already knew how and not credit the source.
April 15th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
cool thanks for this article
May 7th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
I’ve been thinking about this issue in relation to plugins recently. I want to keep my plugins available for free, but I can’t afford the time to offer unlimited free support for them so I decided I charge money for extra (non-trivial) support requests.
I’ve been suggesting to my users that they pay for a customised version of the plugin to suit their site. This has been moderately successful but involves a lot of emailing to and fro debating whether they should do it or not.
So I’ve now partially automated the process by offering paid access to a private premium support forum. There they can receive as much support as they need (within reason) for both my free themes, plugins and CSS generators. It was fairly easy to get up and running as the latest version of SMF features a paid subscription service built into the software.
Another way I’m looking to monetize one of my WordPress plugins is to charge for access to the CSS generator which accompanies it. I’m working on an improved version which will do much of the work which I’m doing by hand at the moment for the users in my premium support forum. Once they’ve paid their money via credit card or PayPal they’ll get instant access to the premium CSS generator, hence making money for me but without removing the open source nature of the plugin itself.