12 WordPress Themes – Month 1. Week 3. Report

Just three weeks ago I started a challenge. A challenge to develop, market and launch 12 WordPress Themes in 12 Months. That’s one a month for a full year. Each theme being different. Each theme building on the code from the earlier theme.

Building on the code? Does that mean the first theme will be a pile of steaming ???????

I certainly hope not. The theme won’t have countless features you’ll never use. It’s built for blogging. Why would you want to use this?

• You run your main site (perhaps an eCommerce site) but want to grow your business by content marketing. Your eCommerce site has a hard to use blog. Simply add a new subdomain blog.[site].com or even a subfolder of your site [domain.com]/blog/ and whack a new WP version on there and start blogging
• If you already run a blog – this will trim things down. It’s minimalistic and easy to read. It’s also super easy for people to SHARE your content.

Week 3 – What’s happened?

Phew. It’s getting to the wire a bit now. Only 2 weeks until launch. Hang on. This is the end of week 3. Isn’t it 1 week? I thought that too. The end of the 4th week would actually be the 25th November (since I started counting the weeks on a Monday). It’s cleaner to launch on the 1st of each month. I’m ignoring the fact that’ll be New Years day when theme #2 is launched.

Anyway. Enough rambling.

What’s happened. Where’s the theme up to? I’m glad you asked.

Well, I developed the theme. It’s doing exactly what I said it would. It’s an Epic Theme for Blogging. In my opinion there’s way too many themes with way too many features trying to do it all. So with theme number one I wanted to give you a way to take it back to blogging. If you wouldn’t mind. Click the link below to tweet how cool this is 🙂

Woah. A theme developed in a week? Well. It took me a bit less than that (10 hours). What are you waiting for, take an early peek here (click the image to be taken to the demo)

The theme isn’t quite ready yet, but you can take an early peek here. Read what’s coming in week four at the bottom of this update.

Demo Content

If you’re wondering how to install demo content on a theme which really tests it out. I’ll be writing a blog post about how to do that soon.

What else happened?

Apart from developing the theme and adding some demo content I also did a fair bit of ‘around the edges’ work in week 3.

• Outreach continued. There’s a couple more lovely posts
  • BobWP did a short (sponsored) post here.
  • DART creations did a lovely post here.
• I added a great Theme Switcher to the top of the demo website. As I develop more themes this will make it easier to flick between them
  • It also makes it easy for you to flick between responsiveness modes 🙂
  • You can check the first demo out (with the demo theme switcher here)

I also continued to build Outreach List WP – this now has 39 websites that you can reach out to (http://outreachlistwp.com/the-list/) as well as another 12 scheduled to be added over the coming week. If you want the weekly roundup of sites – make sure to sign up to the outreachlistwp.com newsletter.

Hey wait, I thought this was a technical follow along on how you developed the theme. I want to develop my own…

Sure thing. It is. Although I want these main reports to cover the development, marketing and launch (and not just lose folk in the development with code examples and how to’s). I’ll be sharing a technical series following the launch of the theme… see week 4 plans below.

What’s still to come in Week 4?

Who keeps asking me these questions? Stop it. It means I have to think. OK. Here’s what’s coming in week 4. The theme is up and available to view here but it’s not fully complete as of the 17th November. What’s missing?

• At the moment it’s just a single column. No sidebar layout. Putting things like a search bar in a sidebar, or social connect buttons I think is a must.
• I’ve not styled the comments yet…
• I still need to hook up the Theme Customiser (to change the colors away from white, grey and black).. for those who like yellow,green and red
• I’ll be adding some admin messages and a page within each theme which can notify you when new themes are on the way (yes, a shameless plug)

That’s not all. In week 4 I’ll also be creating a landing page. This will list the benefits of the theme and hopefully answer any Qs you might have.

Hopefully you’re exciting that the theme is almost ready for release. Did I mention that this will be a FREE DOWNLOAD. No? Well now I have. If you want to be notified when the theme is ready to download you can sign up to the list below.