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.)
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?
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.)
One more question. You wrote: "If you want to make your application match your Wordpress theme (not sure if that is necessarily a good idea)".
Now, say I want to put up an MVP of some application, which is just a landing page. Shouldn't I include some kind of screenshot of what the application will look like?
If so, what design do you use for screenshots of the application itself? Do you use the same theme? A completely different design?
Why include a screenshot? We don't sell software, we sell the concrete improvement software will make in the customer's life. Show her having success with the software: she is a lot more interesting to herself than your app is. Plus, if you are me, your app is fugly anyhow.
My MVP used a cheap ThemeForest theme for the Rails part which shows minimal functionality, but the hero shot image is a racially ambiguous caryoon character, showing the successful businesswoman busy killing it because she was smart and bought my service. It is downright frightening to the engineer in me how radically that increased the number of requests for info I got from ladies. The marketer in me has to soul crush him some days.
This point stolen shamelessly from slide 9 of my Business of Software 2010 talk on selling software to women. I spent all day today on it today (well, when not breaking into Diaspora).
Will you or BoS be posting the video and slides? I'm not able to make the talk, but am working on a product whose users would be almost exclusively female.
Exactly on the last point : since I'm looking to have a 'build script' working with just the sort of WP frontend / Pylons (or RoR) backend that you're doing, I created a Wordpress plugin WP-Templatize that will put tags around important WP elements.
Then, to rebuild the backend template, one can do a 'curl' and then post-process using a script. So when the BizPeople change the layout, one can regenerate the backend template immediately.
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.
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.
Over at WPEngine we're finding a lot of people are using us to host their Saas/Web App landing/sales/info site in WordPress and then run their app at app.domain.com via AWS, Heroku, etc.
Wordpress allows you to decouple the "info site" stack from the web app stack, which are not necessarily the same technologies - and so this can go way beyond just MVP.
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.
