
Wordpress Themes for Launching your Minimum Viable Product - Semetric
http://torgronsund.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/7-wordpress-themes-for-launching-your-minimum-viable-product/
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patio11
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.)

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edanm
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?

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patio11
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.)

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edanm
Thanks, that sounds great.

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?

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patio11
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).

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joshuacc
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.

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patio11
I understand they will. If not, I will post slides and my best practice run
after the conference.

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joshuacc
That's good to know. Thank you!

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mgrouchy
Also a good option for someone working on a Launching a website for their MVP,
especially if you are someone like myself who is a terrible designer.
<http://themeforest.net/> has plenty of great themes that would work well for
landing page, etc.

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ra
Actually I've had a bad experience with themeforest... I wouldn't recommend
it.

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theli0nheart
What happened that put you off?

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replicatorblog
I was blown away when I learned that Groupon actually started life as a simple
WordPress install.

[http://www.tomloverro.com/2010/08/19/groupon-1-0-started-
on-...](http://www.tomloverro.com/2010/08/19/groupon-1-0-started-on-a-
wordpress-blog/)

These themes aren't well suited for ecommerce, they are really just variations
on an iPhone App landing page, but they are nice tools to get something
commercial looking up fast.

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atldev
Have you ever seen an article and thought to yourself, well, I guess I'll have
to jump in now?

This article inspired me to share (ahead of schedule) some info on a new
service we’re building to provide some of the lean startup metrics Tor
mentioned, designed specifically for SaaS products.

We’re looking for folks interested in beta testing and providing customer
development feedback at StartMetrics (<http://startmetrics.com>).

Plus, I think it’s fitting that we’ve been using one of the themes Tor listed.
Took just a few hours to get the basic design up and running, which gives us
more time to work on our MVP

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javery
Use these with caution if your audience is fairly technical. I ran across a
SaaS site the other day and liked how it looked, clicked on the "designed by"
link and realized it was a template design. This dropped my confidence as
anyone can throw up a cheap template design, what kind of attention to detail
was put into the rest of the app? Is there even an app or is this just a
credit card form and a nice looking template? If you are serious about your
business drop the couple thousand to get a nice site designed.

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jessor
I agree. But a "couple thousand" are probably not an option if you're
bootstrapping. Such templates might just work until you can invest in a custom
one.

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javery
If your a technical founder and building the product yourself I don't see why
you couldn't spend a couple thousand to do it right, cutting corner in design
is one of the top mistakes technical founders make. Spend a week consulting
and it will cover the design and more.

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dansingerman
I smell a designer.

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nkohari
To your customers, there is no difference between your "design" and your
"product". If I had to choose between scrimping on design and scrimping on
features, I would choose the latter hands down.

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Nicolo_Borghi
Themes by Woothemes are fantastic, but...aren't all website going to look the
same? I really like the way 37signals re-designed the Basecamp homepage. It's
a little bit different than usual.

Your opinion?

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zentechen
Yes. It is true. However, you can customize the theme any way you want to make
it look unique. For $150 that's a deal... or you can spend $3000 for a
"buyout" template from monster template (<http://www.templatemonster.com/>)
and not even going to work with WordPress.

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city41
Klaveer[1] is a decent little template too. It's more targeted at freelancers
than products though.

[1]<http://stefangrambart.ca/klaveer/>

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skar
I myself have set up a site with a woothemes template and it was easy and
painless and it worked across browsers too. It will take me forever to learn
enough html, css, js to make the site look this good and also cross browser
compatible, if I did this by myself from scratch. And gravity
forms(<http://www.gravityforms.com/>) rocks too, for contact, download or sign
up forms.

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zentechen
There you go. <http://64.38.236.7> Build on WordPress. Anymore questions?
Well, I have to say WooTheme is fantastic. It does everything I
wanted...almost, then WP Plugins come to rescue. once you learned how to use
WP as a content management platform, the possibility is endless.

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ndl
One side effect of canned themes is that you will look similar to other
startups doing the same thing. This could be an advantage in the beginning,
because the site will feel familiar to new customers who are used to the
theme. You will want to differentiate if distinctive branding becomes part of
your strategy.

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mattmiller
This is great. Is is easy to use Wordpress user management as a starting point
for a user back end? Right now I am using userCake, which got me up in about 5
minutes. If I go with Wordpress would it be better to drop userCake for WP
user management, or integrate the two?

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zentechen
I was warned about potential security vulnerability in WP, but guess that's
true for any Internet applications. Also, any WP updates could potentially
break plugins used. If you got a lot of plugins, need to be very careful.

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sandGorgon
Quite a few of Woothemes/Templatic templates are available in Drupal flavors
as well.. and they look to be cheaper as well.

Given that I can run Drupal w/ Postgres (the DB I'm already using), its a nice
value proposition.

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StavrosK
Does anyone know how I can download/buy the SaaS theme [1]? It looks quite
good.

[1] <http://saas-wp-i.worryfreelabs.com/>

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ZitchDog
<http://themeforest.net/user/goThemeTeam/portfolio>

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StavrosK
Update: I bought it, and it's _amazing_. Everything is changeable in HTML,
_everything_! I wanted to add more features to the pricing table, just add a
<li> and it all resizes properly. Text on buttons is all HTML (no images),
everything's just fantastic. I'm thinking about emailing this guys to tell
them about how great it is, best 10 pounds I've ever spent.

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NHQ
Many begin as a Wordpress. Many end as a "minimum viable product".

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bbsabelli
Nice designs but I'm skeptical. WooThemes spam?

