My Latest Endeavor
This post was published Thursday March 4, 2010 filled under life.
This is something that I’ve been excited about for a long time and I’m not sure what happened but sometime last week a fire was lit under my ass and I put everything I was working on off to the side and really just worked around the clock to get this project going. I literally didn’t even walk outside of my apartment for 6 days, which is kind of scary, but hopefully my hard work will payoff and getting things rolling is definitely a great feeling of accomplishment.
The project is the following website: www.gamblingthemes.com, check it out but in brief I’ll explain what the scope of the website will be. I’ve been working with Online Poker Affiliates, playing poker and working (almost daily) in WordPress for the past 2 years now. My idea was to start a WordPress Theme Store and design some decent looking ‘gambling’ oriented WordPress themes for those promoting online poker/casinos, publishing gambling content or just running a blog of their poker strategy, sessions and adventures. Sometimes I get into conversations with other poker players at various card rooms and after I explain what it is I do for a living, a pretty common response is “oh I want to start a website (or blog). Now with my Gambling Themes project I can refer them to my site for what will soon be a 1-Stop shop for anyone wanting to start a gambling oriented website.
Building organically
The premium WordPress Themes market is pretty competitive with a ton of talented designers (Press75, WooThemes etc.) distributing awesome themes of their own and it’s not going to be easy to just start up a theme market place (by myself) and expect to compete with these seasoned pros but I think marketing to my niche of customers I should have some mediocre success eventually.
I just did a soft-launch yesterday, many areas/pages of the site are left un-developed and I currently only have 1 theme that is completed and ready for sale, but I really didn’t want to keep putting this off until I was completely satisfied because I’d never get it off the ground. A big problem I see is that my competitors have 30+ excellent themes to choose from, all of which have a similar theme of either: News/Magazine, Professional/Business or Portfolio/Photo Gallery so this is where I see some opportunity.
I have another theme in the lab currently, that I’m expecting to release some time this month which would only put me up to a total of 2 themes and still no where that I’d like to be at but I’m hoping to generate some income by selling the themes currently available and make some money that I can put back into the site and have a plethora of themes designed in time.
Theme Frame Work
I really like how WooThemes has a custom framework that they use with each of their themes, and I’m going to try to eventually have the same system packaged with each of my themes. I’m currently looking for a PHP/WordPress developer to work with and build a theme framework that will include many custom, groundbreaking features and options for a great, simple to use WordPress Theme. If you’d like to know more about this or think you’d like to take on the opportunity, please contact me.
That’s all for now, I hope to finish up soon and for things take off as planned. Check out the site, jump on my mailing list to keep up-to-date and give me some feedback if you’d like.