A New Theme and a New Idea
Those who actually come to the site instead of reading the RSS feed will notice a new theme on ye ole’ jcCommerce blog. I think its snazzy, how about you?
This is actually a premium theme that I am toying with the idea of buying a developer license to. The theme’s creator offered three different licenses- basic, premium, and developer. Basic was one site, you had to keep the credits in the footer, etc. Premium was a branding free option, and you could use it for all your own sites as long as you didn’t sell it. Developer allows you to create derivative works and sell them, use it as a base for client sites- basically call it your own.
I contacted the themes creator and asked if I could buy the premium version, play with it and see how I liked it, and if I decided it was for me later upgrade to the developer version for the difference in price. They agreed, and so here we are.
This theme has some nice features- several different index, post, and archive page layouts, built in ad blocks (disabled right now on my blog), post thumbnail support, the nifty featured article scroller thingy at the top of the page, etc. I think the best way to look at it is as a rapid development kit to theme development- something I value as I don’t have a lot of time with running Secure Delivery to spend building a custom theme from scratch. With this I’ll pick my layouts, modify my visual styles and graphics, and deploy quickly.
I intend to design custom themes based off it for jcCommerce (you can see the work-in-progress now), the Secure Delivery Blog, and a couple other personal blogs I am currently developing.
So far I have been tweaking the features to how I like them on this blog and I’ll be honest- I love it. Next week I’ll dive in to modifying the visual styles in depth for the Secure Delivery blog and I’ll be able to decide if I want to drop the extra $100 for the developer version.
After all, I already know of a digital product delivery solution that I can sell custom themes with, and I would probably sell limited editions of 10 copies or such using Secure Delivery’s sale limit feature. It makes sense to invest a few hours making unique designs :)
Comment by Allen Taylor on 15 February 2008:
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Allen Taylor
Comment by SarahG on 15 February 2008:
Where did your search go? :(
Comment by Chance on 15 February 2008:
Right now its buried over in the tab interface in the right column. I am going to move it out as soon as I have time- I agree with you that search should be front and center on any site!
Comment by Joe on 21 February 2008:
Nice work on the new site theme, I have seen your site go through many design changes and I have to say each one gets better than the last. I’ve been looking into purchasing a premium wordpress theme myself, examining the likes of WP Remix and Revolution but haven’t decided just yet. Would you mind sharing which Premium theme this is? I have multiple sites I want to use wordpress on and think premium may be the way to go.
Comment by Not John Chow on 17 March 2008:
I noticed that when I clicked on one of your articles that your header appeared chopped showing only the bottom portion of it. Maybe just a glitch from myself but, I know that you need to try a theme out on a variety of platforms. I am viewing it today on IE9.
Nice articles though. I will stop back. Thanks.