

Building my first web app - 5 months later - premiumthemes
http://premiumthemes.com/blog/building-premium-themes/?ref=hn

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forbes
I'm one of the guys who built ThemeForest. (I don't work at Envato any more.)

I built the rollover previews on that site (which has been rebuilt and
improved many times since). I can tell you that you are going to have trouble
keeping the preview in view when they are as large as the ones that you are
using, whilst still making it possibly to see the other icons in the grid.
You'll need to flip it left and right, up and down depending on the position
of the mouse.

I also think you need to think about what value you are providing. I think a
curated site with less themes with proper reviews would be much more useful
than just a scrape of the thousands of themes out there. Your own reviews
would be original content which might have a slim hope of outranking the
actual themes themselves in Google results. Without that, I don't think you
will get a lot of traffic.

Good luck.

~~~
csomar
I'm aware of the rollover preview issue but didn't have the time to fix it.
Indeed, it's not simple but I think it was covered in many tutorials, so I
won't have to reinvent much of the wheel.

As for the value proposition of the web app, I'm still unsure about it (in the
discovery phase). I'll be trying different things and checking their
output/ROI. Manual reviews of themes, hosting reviews, building a user
community...

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cocoflunchy
Cached:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Apremi...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Apremiumthemes.com%2Fblog%2Fbuilding-
premium-
themes%2F%3Fref%3Dhn&aq=f&oq=cache%3Apremiumthemes.com%2Fblog%2Fbuilding-
premium-themes%2F%3Fref%3Dhn&aqs=chrome.0.57j58.1510&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

PS/Protip: In Chrome, add "cache:" in front of the URL to find the cached
version of the current page.

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arafalov
For scraping, you may want to look at ScraperWiki
(<https://scraperwiki.com/docs/python/python_intro_tutorial/>).

For search, see if you can use Solr or Elastic Search and it will save you a
lot of headaches later. Do not reinvent that wheel. They both run as stand-
alone systems that you just need to talk via HTTP to.

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pinouchon
To me, this looks like a themeforest redirector

~~~
csomar
Right now, we only display ThemeForest themes. Though I crawled other
marketplaces, there still some work for filtering the results since other
marketplaces are more obscure about the theme information (like sales and
ratings).

The web app purpose is to help you find a theme (and thus redirect you to one
of these marketplaces).

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realdlee
When I accessed the Sign in/Sign up pages, nothing loaded up for me (Mac
Firefox).

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mattmanser
_Abid Omar

I'm the man who keeps this site running._

Don't tempt fate next time ;)

~~~
csomar
Haha, I expected this. I was watching the Google Analytics real-time report
and saw 100-120 online users. I kept checking the site...running fine, so I
went to lunch and somehow the HTTP Server died.

~~~
davidcollantes
Right now clicking on any theme goes back to the front page, or goes to a
blank screen.

~~~
csomar
The full link for the theme is hidden (hovering will show
premiumthemes.com/go) in a similar fashion to what Google does to search
results link.

Seeing the URL (<http://premiumthemes.com/go>) in my Google analytics confirm
the issues is happening to some users, I'm disabling it right now.

