Show HN : My weekend(s) project - Strapfolio

http://www.strapfolio.com/

by anujkk • 14 years ago

36 28 14 years ago

markyc2• 14 years ago

looking great, consider bundling 5 clean, professional looking themes/designs with it and you'll probably touch even closer to home

anujkk11• 14 years ago

by themes/designs you mean skins? That's the plan. I will provide as many different skins as possible and I'm also looking to integrate it completely with twitter/github/flickr/youtube/etc. Besides that I may also provide a visiting card psd matching the look & feel of theme as a freebie.

Right now, I was itching to launch it so I did it with very basic version.

Please provide suggestions on how else to improve it?

markyc2• 14 years ago

yes, that's what i meant.

great v 1.0 man! keep iterating on it, and start collecting emails and talk to users/customers to get a feel of what they need

you're doing great!

svachalek• 14 years ago

Have you tried this in mobile browsers? Looks a bit broken on my iPhone.

anujkk11• 14 years ago

Yes and I know it will not work well in mobile devices. As of now, this theme supports only desktop and tablets. I will try to add some responsiveness if possible.

Alan01252• 14 years ago

Looks really good. In fact I'm kind of envious, the base theme already looks better than what I was able to create using the same stack.

A couple of very minor things:

The buy now button has an alert attached to it.

The documentation is great, but it suggests that you have to create / install the plug-ins by yourself? If that's true it would put me off buying.

Hope that helps.

p.s It might be worth enabling the responsive features of bootstrap on the main site. It works well on the demo.

anujkk11• 14 years ago

Thanks a lot. I fixed that alert message. I forgot to remove it before uploading my files to server. You don't need to create any plugin. Also, you don't need to install any plugin by yourself except contact form 7 plugin (a 3rd party plugin). All you need to do is to copy/paste some static HTML in wordpress pages. I'm looking to provide a content import file for this in next version.

I was struggling with adjusting the screenshot image size when I used bootstrap responsive features on main site. It was looking ugly and I wasn't having much free time. So, I used the default 960px fixed layout.

mikesilvis• 14 years ago

Looks great!

webbruce• 14 years ago

This is a good start, I would definitely find a designer friend to help out on the frontend.

anujkk11• 14 years ago

Sorry. I didn't get you. Are you suggesting me to get some designer or you are talking about yourself?

codegeek• 14 years ago

Looks good. One thing to mention: the demo page at http://demo.strapfolio.com/ does not render the stylesheets correctly in IE8.

anujkk11• 14 years ago

Mind telling what's the issue? I find it working fine on IE8, except the fact that round corners aren't working. Twitter Bootstrap doesn't support round corners because IE8 doesn't provide support for the CSS3 property and pseudo-class border-radius and :nth-child.

ivanbernat• 14 years ago

You know Gmail ignores dots in usernames?

> anuj (dot) kk (at) gmail (dot) com

This is a bit hard on the eyes so try it as anujkk (at) gmail (dot) com. Also, Gmail has good spam filters :)

anujkk11• 14 years ago

I wasn't aware about that. Updated.

bluetidepro2• 14 years ago

Don't get me wrong, it isn't a bad design but I think your price point may be a bit high for what other competitors sell their high quality WordPress themes for. $30 can buy you a much more robust (custom -- not Bootstrap) theme on sites like http://themeforest.net, http://www.mojo-themes.com, http://www.woothemes.com, etc. You may want to look at bringing your price down slightly to compete with those bigger markets.

anujkk11• 14 years ago

How much you think is a good price for this?

bluetidepro2• 14 years ago

Honestly, since a lot of it is built on top of Bootstrap, which probably sped up your development time and would also speed up someone trying to replicate it themselves. I would say closer to the $15-$20 range would make it much more enticing to people who know about those other sites.

runako• 14 years ago

I don't want to come across as insulting, but I'd recommend a different pricing strategy. Instead of focusing on the price, focus on the advantages/differences of Strapfolio versus other themes. What does it do differently? Why did you make it? Sell its simplicity: more features != more value when you're talking about website themes.

But don't reduce the price (yet). I'd be surprised if $30 (or even $40 or $50) would be a barrier to your sales. You don't know yet either, so why lower your price? If it's not worth $50 yet, what can you add to it to make it worth $50?

Incidentally, WooThemes (linked above) will charge $70 to use their portfolio theme, and they sell a whole lot of themes at that price.

onko2• 14 years ago

Have you made any sales yet?

anujkk11• 14 years ago

Only 4 but I would still consider it a mini success that in 2-3 hours it got 8K+ visits, 45% trying demo and 8% clicking buy button. What I don't understand is when they are clicking buy button why aren't they actually completing the transaction? Is gumroad turning them off or the HN crowd is just testing if buy button actually works. :)

onko2• 14 years ago

Nice, congrats! And yeah, I clicked it just to see what payment processor you're using.. :)

anujkk11• 14 years ago

Some analytics for last 4 hours(time since posting it to HN) :

4898 total unique visitors.

1567 clicked demo button.

87 clicked buy button (but not completed transaction)

72 checked documentation

28 clicked on screenshot

4 completed sale.

JoelMarsh2• 14 years ago

Senior UX guy here... free advice:

1) Your demo button is killing your sales.

The drop between step 2 and 3 of your stats is the proof, although I immediately noticed the problem: People don't go "back" to make a sale, they go forward. When they click your demo button, they no longer have a call to action button to lead them to the sale. Recommendation: add a top bar that stays with them as they check out the demo. Regardless of how you solve this, it's worth losing sleep over it.

2) Changing the demo content (text) to be about the theme itself.

At least in the intro paragraph. I found it very disorienting after clicking the demo button.

3) Pick 3 selling points, not 9.

The first one should almost convince me by itself. Make them bigger and more visual. The rest are just extras. Make them look like extras.

4) Remember that you're selling design to designers.

There are beautiful Wordpress themes that are free. Yours looks ok, but not $30 ok. ;) TELL ME WHY I LOVE THIS, and tell me in the first sentence.

5) Screenshots suck. Use the image to show me or teach me something I need to understand about this product. Better yet, get a really nice background image and fill that baby blue area with it. Add some emotion, man!

6) By pitching it based on Underscores and Bootstrap you're immediately selling to a technical audience. In my experience, visual creatives are not particularly technical. Why is bootstrap good? What is Underscores? etc.

7) A/B test versions with and without the price in the buy button. You include the price when it makes the product more appealing. Yours is high. the A/B test will give you a very rough idea of how much effect that has on conversion.

8) Include the demo / buy links in the header of your documentation. Beside the logo, not in the top-right corner.

anujkk11• 14 years ago

These are some very good advice. Thanks. In coming weekends, I will make improvements suggested by you and everybody else to improve both the offering and landing page.

Show HN : My weekend(s) project - Strapfolio

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