Wordpress Themes for Launching your Minimum Viable Product

http://torgronsund.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/7-wordpress-themes-for-launching-your-minimum-viable-product/

by Semetric • 16 years ago

188 50 16 years ago

torgronsund.wordpress.com

I was blown away when I learned that Groupon actually started life as a simple WordPress install.

http://www.tomloverro.com/2010/08/19/groupon-1-0-started-on-...

These themes aren't well suited for ecommerce, they are really just variations on an iPhone App landing page, but they are nice tools to get something commercial looking up fast.

patio114• 16 years ago

I especially recommend these for technical founders who don't have a bone of design sense in their bodies, like myself. I used a spiritually similar WooThemes template (Delegate) to get AppointmentReminder's site ready. It took less than 20 minutes to set up. I added a 99Designs logo and a single custom image from my designer, and it now looks fairly professional relative to the amount of investment. (The service itself isn't near ready yet, but people ask to buy it on strength of the front page and the MVP demo, so that is probably a good sign.)

edanm2• 16 years ago

What's the advantage of using a WordPress install and theme? Why not just get a pure css/html theme, and build from there?

The advantage, imo, of using a non-WordPress theme is that when you start building the actual product, you're using the exact same files. As far as I know, if you get a WordPress theme, you'll have to scratch it when you start building your actual site. Am I wrong about this?

retlehs• 16 years ago

I think an advantage of using a WP install is that you can easily manage pages, galleries, etc. and you can also use plugins to handle forms.

You won't have to start over when building your actual site if you build/use a WordPress theme. At my dayjob we build most of our client sites in WordPress so my starting framework is in WP (it's basically a combination of HTML5 Boilerplate + Blueprint + Starkers).

When I need to build a non-WP site or convert a WP site to HTML/CSS, I go to my framework WordPress site, view the source and save it as index.html.

There's only a few things that need to be changed, like the path to the stylesheet and images.

patio114• 16 years ago

I can type decent copy a heck of a lot faster in a WYSIWYG editor which is guaranteed to make everything look pretty than I can type decent copy in NetBeans while worrying about adding my p's and div's and line breaks. Also, it is much easier to plump out the site, create new pages with a consistent navigation, and interlink them. You also get non-braindead on-page SEO for free, which is heads and tails above what many developers will deliver if you ask them to write pages in their editor of choice. ("Oh, that's nice, your sitewide title tag is 'Company Name Home Page'.")

Bonus points: you don't have to be an engineer to do it, so if you have a business guy, he can go be useful for a change. (I kid, I kid.)

If you want to make your application match your Wordpress theme (not sure if that is necessarily a good idea), you can do it fairly easily. In Rails, you'd View Source on your homepage, copy/paste everything into layouts/application.rhtml, delete the chunk that renders the main content on the page and replace it with <%= yield %>, and you're ready to go for development purposes. (You'll eventually hack it to bits for SEO, collapsing Javascripts/CSS, and other reasons, but you'd do that with a HTML/CSS template anyhow.)

andreshb• 16 years ago

Yes. For most SaaS/Web Apps the pre-login site is a sales site, not the actual product. (see basecamp, salesforce, kissmetrics etc.,) and you may be spending too much time before you launch the landing page, preventing you from getting feedback quickly from your MVP/Dry-run.

In a second phase, you can go back and do it from scratch, when you have more time and resources.

neurotech1• 16 years ago

It is almost trivial to convert the main elements of a WordPress theme to a non-Wordpress Platform. It depends on the terms of the project, but likely means a reduced number of "look and feel" changes before completion of the project theme.

javery6• 16 years ago

Use these with caution if your audience is fairly technical. I ran across a SaaS site the other day and liked how it looked, clicked on the "designed by" link and realized it was a template design. This dropped my confidence as anyone can throw up a cheap template design, what kind of attention to detail was put into the rest of the app? Is there even an app or is this just a credit card form and a nice looking template? If you are serious about your business drop the couple thousand to get a nice site designed.

jessor• 16 years ago

I agree. But a "couple thousand" are probably not an option if you're bootstrapping. Such templates might just work until you can invest in a custom one.

javery6• 16 years ago

If your a technical founder and building the product yourself I don't see why you couldn't spend a couple thousand to do it right, cutting corner in design is one of the top mistakes technical founders make. Spend a week consulting and it will cover the design and more.

aed• 16 years ago

Isn't the point of the MVP that you're putting the cart before the horse on purpose? The $2,000 on design should come after you've found if there's a market for your product.

I agree on using caution with a technical audience though... perhaps using a cheapy $30 template with a little customization so you don't have to have an attribution link and it doesn't look like everything else?

javery6• 16 years ago

Honestly I don't know why you even need a marketing site like this if you are just working on your MVP. I am working on my MVP and am just collecting emails and working directly with potential customers.

joshuacc4• 16 years ago

Moral of the story: remove the "designed by" link unless you're required to keep it. The problem wasn't the template design, but that it still had the advertising link.

mgrouchy• 16 years ago

Also a good option for someone working on a Launching a website for their MVP, especially if you are someone like myself who is a terrible designer. http://themeforest.net/ has plenty of great themes that would work well for landing page, etc.

leftnode• 16 years ago

Yeah, I agree and use them extensively. They have a particularly good area for Admin templates.

ra2• 16 years ago

Actually I've had a bad experience with themeforest... I wouldn't recommend it.

theli0nheart• 16 years ago

What happened that put you off?

whereareyou• 16 years ago

I have purchased 5 templates from themeforest. They have worked very well! It helps to read the customer reviews and ratings when buying a template. I have also used their sister site codecanyon.net to buy wordpress plugins and graphicriver.net for stock images.

http://themeforest.net http://graphicriver.net http://codecanyon.net

Some of my favorite wordpress themes form themeforest: http://themeforest.net/item/pandora-wordpress-business-portf... http://themeforest.net/item/bigfeature-wordpress-theme/51702 This one lets you sell digital downloads: http://themeforest.net/item/the-furniture-store-wordpress-ec...

skar• 16 years ago

I myself have set up a site with a woothemes template and it was easy and painless and it worked across browsers too. It will take me forever to learn enough html, css, js to make the site look this good and also cross browser compatible, if I did this by myself from scratch. And gravity forms(http://www.gravityforms.com/) rocks too, for contact, download or sign up forms.

Nicolo_Borghi• 16 years ago

Themes by Woothemes are fantastic, but...aren't all website going to look the same? I really like the way 37signals re-designed the Basecamp homepage. It's a little bit different than usual.

Your opinion?

zentechen3• 16 years ago

Yes. It is true. However, you can customize the theme any way you want to make it look unique. For $150 that's a deal... or you can spend $3000 for a "buyout" template from monster template (http://www.templatemonster.com/) and not even going to work with WordPress.

bbsabelli• 16 years ago

Nice designs but I'm skeptical. WooThemes spam?

city41• 16 years ago

Klaveer[1] is a decent little template too. It's more targeted at freelancers than products though.

[1]http://stefangrambart.ca/klaveer/

zentechen3• 16 years ago

There you go. http://64.38.236.7 Build on WordPress. Anymore questions? Well, I have to say WooTheme is fantastic. It does everything I wanted...almost, then WP Plugins come to rescue. once you learned how to use WP as a content management platform, the possibility is endless.

zentechen3• 16 years ago

I was warned about potential security vulnerability in WP, but guess that's true for any Internet applications. Also, any WP updates could potentially break plugins used. If you got a lot of plugins, need to be very careful.

StavrosK3• 16 years ago

Does anyone know how I can download/buy the SaaS theme [1]? It looks quite good.

[1] http://saas-wp-i.worryfreelabs.com/

ZitchDog• 16 years ago

http://themeforest.net/user/goThemeTeam/portfolio

StavrosK3• 16 years ago

Thank you!

StavrosK3• 16 years ago

Update: I bought it, and it's amazing. Everything is changeable in HTML, everything! I wanted to add more features to the pricing table, just add a <li> and it all resizes properly. Text on buttons is all HTML (no images), everything's just fantastic. I'm thinking about emailing this guys to tell them about how great it is, best 10 pounds I've ever spent.

mattmiller• 16 years ago

This is great. Is is easy to use Wordpress user management as a starting point for a user back end? Right now I am using userCake, which got me up in about 5 minutes. If I go with Wordpress would it be better to drop userCake for WP user management, or integrate the two?

ndl• 16 years ago

One side effect of canned themes is that you will look similar to other startups doing the same thing. This could be an advantage in the beginning, because the site will feel familiar to new customers who are used to the theme. You will want to differentiate if distinctive branding becomes part of your strategy.

NHQ• 16 years ago

Many begin as a Wordpress. Many end as a "minimum viable product".

sandGorgon• 16 years ago

Quite a few of Woothemes/Templatic templates are available in Drupal flavors as well.. and they look to be cheaper as well.

Given that I can run Drupal w/ Postgres (the DB I'm already using), its a nice value proposition.

atldev• 16 years ago

Have you ever seen an article and thought to yourself, well, I guess I'll have to jump in now?

This article inspired me to share (ahead of schedule) some info on a new service we’re building to provide some of the lean startup metrics Tor mentioned, designed specifically for SaaS products.

We’re looking for folks interested in beta testing and providing customer development feedback at StartMetrics (http://startmetrics.com).

Plus, I think it’s fitting that we’ve been using one of the themes Tor listed. Took just a few hours to get the basic design up and running, which gives us more time to work on our MVP

Wordpress Themes for Launching your Minimum Viable Product

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