A Geek Apart

I recently (last week or something?) spoke to a dear friend and professional colleague of mine last week, and she told me something quite disturbing. She was using (against my warnings, no less) an online service to store her GTD system. I wont mention the service because it’s not important…and I tend to dislike ticking people off.

Anyway, she moved her office, and her computers, last week, only to find that her data had been lost. Now, I cant tell you if it was because of the move, and error on her part, a server-side problem with the web app, or just plain weird crap that led to this loss. Nevertheless, all her data was gone. No backups. Nothing to revert to.

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After designing several themes, I have come to the realization that it’s much harder work than I originally anticipated. Some gotchas to watch out for:

• Browser Testing:
  • Internet Explorer 6
  • Internet Explorer 7
  • Internet Explorer 5.X (does anyone user that any longer?)
  • FireFox
  • Opera
  • Safari (and Omniweb and other browsers that use like engines
• WordPress Versions
• Wordpress 2.1.3
• The new and improved 2.2
• Provide an organized, layerd .psd
• comment your code, especially your css file
• Validate, Validate, Validate
• Your XHTML
• AND your CSS
• Test Every Page and Function:
• Front Page
• Sample Static Pages
• Long Posts
• Very Short Posts
• Search Results Page
• Comments List, and Comment form
• Category and Archive pages

So as you can see from the abbreviated list above, this kind of thing takes time. Don’t even attempt to charge based on hourly. That’s not how you should approach it. If a theme takes you 3 or 4 hours to complete (from conception to mockup, to coding, to validating, to sale), and you base it on roughly $25.00 per hour, you’re right at the top-end of the market rate for WordPress Themes.

So how do you really make a buck? What if you’re really talented, and have a passion for making Themes? What if you really are happy just sitting down and producing fantastic themes?

Well, you may be able to charge more per hour, if you’re really great. But it would be smarter to also take a moment to think about your workflow to shorten the production time.

If you could work on several similar themes simultaneously, you could produce 3 themes in 4 hours rather than 1 theme in 4 hours. Group your tasks together. This way you can focus on each step instead of bouncing from photoshop to dreamweaver to the browser so much.

If you are an aspiring theme maker, check out Small Potato’s posts over at WPDesigner. He’s got some really great insight, and everyone can use a little more of that.

With the going rate for great themes, if you produced (ha, and sold) 3 themes a week, that could add quite a bit in supplementary income to your freelance biz.

Technorati Tags: blogging, design, commerce, sell, technology, theme, wordpress

I have been experimenting with working from home for one of my jobs. My reasons are pretty selfish:

• I’m tired of paying over $3.00 a gallon for gas.
• I’m tired of paying vending machine prices for coffee and soda while at work.
• I’m more comfortable at home, thus I am more productive, sort of.
• I am on my own equipment, which has been customized and tweaked for efficiency to no end.
• I see it as a total waste to spend a total of 2 hours from eyes opening to sitting at my desk working when I can just get up and get to work within 20 minutes by staying at home.
• I hate traffic. Unfortunately, I am in the “bubble” of rush hour twice a day, and I cant really adjust my schedule to avoid it.

Now, after this past Friday, I have also noticed some downsides:
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Way back in ye olde days, WordPress theme designers were faced with some compatability issues. Essentially the Automattic Widgets plugin has become a default standard when issuing themes for free release or for sale.

However, not everyone had the widgets plugin installed. So designers had to create the sidebar to suit both cases. The first line “basically” says, if the sidebar widgets function exists, then present the chosen layout the user created in their dashboard. Else (meaning, if that function doesn’t exist), present the following layout… And what followed would be hard coded sidebar functions.

No longer! Since WordPress 2.2 has widget support built in, designers will merely have to place the widget code in the sidebar, with nothing else. Simple.

Now, of course, since 2.2 is still wet behind the ears, not everyone will be jumping on the bandwagon this weekend, so it’s still a good idea to hard code that sidebar for backwards compatibility purposes. Nevertheless, the future looks pretty promising. If you are very explicit and upfront when documenting your theme for sale/download, you can specify that they must have wordpress 2.2. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Remember, however, that you wont reach the largest audience. More likely, you will be reaching the wordpress enthusiast market, especially how early in the release we are (it was released May 15th).

Technorati Tags: widget, puppy, wordpress

Just downloaded WordPress 2.2 to my development server to try it out. Browsing through the Wordpress.org support forums, several people are having a little difficulty with respect to their Automattic sidebar widgets plugin after upgrading.

Here’s an important bit: Deactivate any and all plugins before you upgrade. This has always been an issue, and it’s an important step to follow to the letter.

Here’s the reason: In the newest upgrade 2.2, you don’t need to install the widgets.php plugin. It’s already there in your wp-includes folder. If you try to upgrade with that widget active, your database will be corrupt, and I hope you have a backup, cuz you’re gonna need it.

Follow the instructions exactly and you’ll be just fine.

Technorati Tags: howto, news, software, technology, wordpress