Ive put hours of work into this project, a lot of hours. Made a working theme system where any user can upload a zip file containing they’re theme, and it gets listed on the site right away, and the system takes care of making screenshots etc - I’m even almost done making a validation checker that checks even more of the needed file integrity for WordPress themes.
The, earlier »Live WordPress theme list«, only contained a theme gallery - categorized and searchable, while I now have updated the site to be a full-featured WordPress theme related news site, bringing news, articles, guides etc, to give my shot at collecting all guides and information about WordPress theming in one place.
After the launch quickly the daily unique visitor count increased and is now about 1000 unique visitors per day, and an average of almost 7 pageviews per visitor. So why wouldn’t I put some ads on the site, to try to make it pay off the hours I put into the project?
Although all sounds great so far, I’m just not so pleased about the way some people have reacted to my initiative. Yesterday a WordPress IRC meetup was arranged with this topic:
http://themes.wordpress.net has no adverts. It needs help though. The new sites http://webdesignbook.net/themes / http://www.wordpresstheme.com/ are using other people’s work to create a resource which they will profit from. This I assume is fine and themes/wordpress/net should be deleted.
A quote from the IRC meetup regarding themes.wordpress.net:
his website has been plundered recently with the same IP downloading all the themes. There are also several sites sprining up that throw ads at work which he has done for free
- How should I profit from having ads on the web site, when I’ve put a lot of hours into the project - the income of ads isn’t even enough to pay for my working hours. The hours spent on the theme site is hours not used on freelance work.
- If people dont like my site because of the ads, don’t visit it?
- I’ve downloaded the themes from themes.wordpress.net, yes, but I have downloaded a lot more than that. themes.wordpress.net wasn’t being updated enough in my honest opinion, and i thought i would do the whole WordPress community a favor by making a, in my opinion, better alternative - take it or leave it.
I am so sorry - if trying to help out the community is bad in the authors eyes, then it’s a community that I don’t want to be a part of. If people think in general that my site and I are destructive for the community, please tell me instead of starting a meeting about my project behind my back, and then I’ll close down the website, stop making themes and guides for WordPress and find another blogging tool which has a more open community.
19 comments
Nuggetbro Says:
Let me put this done for you and let you workout what you think from my answer. Human is a carbon based lifeform , we as a exsistence require certain materials to survive such as food and water. These materials were once readily avaliable for free but that was before the invention of currency (or barter in that case). Now to survive you still need those basic materials but they cost currenty ( we will call it money). Now you work hard codeing this site spending your time managering and administering this site and you still require certian things. What im getting to is simple , everyone needs to earn money, even opensource companys need to earn money to survive ( usually for lawsuits ) but its a fact. I love your site and is a great merit to the community and hope it grows further and is around for a long long time.
30/03-2006 | 13:02
mumbles Says:
I know how much time undersigned has put into this, and some people knew what the project was. If themes.wordpress.org and whatever other theme search pages out there got together there could be a kickarse resource for everyone to use regarding themes, and perhaps theme making. if all the themes where searched for licences before being put up on the theme sites, and everyone knew where they where perhaps everyone would be happy ?
About the adds, if a resource for a community is being hammered and is on a private server for the moment there should be some way for the person who server its on to earn money. Ads on the web are a fact of life as people try and get money out of there content so a few more cant heart. (And who clicks on ads anyway unless they are related to what you are searching for?)
If everyone who’s interested gets together and tries to develop some kind of theme mainframe that could be shared for the good of the wp community, be it hosted on a private server or on wordpress.org.
I for one would be glad to help out with something like this, even if it took a few hours every day.
30/03-2006 | 13:23
Amy Says:
Well, I personally thank you. While I do appreciate the viewer at themes.wordpress.net, it’s always great to have more options, especially when your new site appears to be very up-to-date in terms of new themes.
I also really like the nice, simple vertical scroll — very quick way to check out previews.
Hope you don’t take it down and don’t take the criticism too much to heart — I’m new to blogging, but it’s already clear to me that many bloggers are quite territorial about what they perceive as “their” content , when in fact, they’re hosting content others have created. Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t know how you call ‘dibs’ on somebody else’s work.
30/03-2006 | 22:22
Anon Says:
The, earlier »Live WordPress theme list«, only contained a theme gallery - categorized and searchable, while I now have updated the site to be a full-featured WordPress theme related news site, bringing news, articles, guides etc, to give my shot at collecting all guides and information about WordPress theming in one place.
To be honest, I much preferred the previous layout - see what the theme looks like from a screenshot and test it out in one easy click. Now you’ve got to click the thumbnail then click to test it and then go all the way back to the beginning if you don’t like it…
Bring back the Live list!!
01/04-2006 | 17:06
WordPress theme park » Feature requests Says:
[…] In order to give our visitors and users the best features we are really open to hear your feature wishes. On the old site, the »Live WordPress theme list« you were able to vote, download and test run any theme directly from the gallery view. We have recieved a request here to put these back, but is that the general wish by all of you - do you want these features back? Both download links, vote links and test run links? […]
01/04-2006 | 19:47
steve cooley Says:
You obviously care about wordpress themes, so why not become the official maintainer of the data? Moving your system to the wordpress domain would eliminate your hosting costs and would eliminate accusations that you’re trying to make money at this.
05/04-2006 | 23:35
The undersigned Says:
Steve:
First of all, I believe that competition is healthy - why should every WordPress related site be a wp.org/net/com site and be »official«. I believe that competition helps open source communities to grow.
Second: moving it to wp.org wouldnt eliminate costs, because I would still have to run a server hosting the snapshot service used to generate thumbnails on the fly.
Third: Wouldn’t »becoming an official site« eliminate my freedom of speech? How would it be handled if I wrote something »not so good« about a WP project?
06/04-2006 | 9:21
adam Says:
wow.
some people are really small minded. objecting to advertisements is so irrational, i don’t know where to begin.
i suppose i can understand the objection to downloading the themes en masse from T.W.N, if you did that without warning. maybe.
12/04-2006 | 19:43
sunburntkamel » WordPress Theme Park vs. Wordpress Theme Viewer Says:
[…] The undersigned » Blog Archive » WordPress theme park […]
26/04-2006 | 16:46
The undersigned » Blog Archive » The future of WordPress theme park Says:
[…] Last night, and earlier, at the WordPress IRC Meetup, the whole theme gallery situation were up for discussion. The result of this meetup is, that I’m closing down the theme park, and instead joining the themes.wordpress.net developement team. […]
27/04-2006 | 7:22
Anonymous Says:
bbbbb
08/05-2006 | 10:27
3DSL Eugen Says:
on themes.wordpress.net is themeupload not more aviable :( its bad.
04/11-2006 | 18:35
Earners Blog Says:
What happened to this theme project? :-/
28/12-2006 | 5:25
Kate Says:
I would like to welcome all visitors to have a look at the free themes listed here:
http://www.siteground.com/wordpress-hosting/wordpress-themes.htm
26/01-2007 | 15:53
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03/04-2007 | 12:46
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finally found it! t-shirt website with online store
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as I promise, check this funny tshirt site
did you heared about this crazy t-shirt online store?
for all the cool t-shirt lovers, check this site out!
get funny t-shirt for summer 2007
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WOW! Found this cool tshirts website
If you looking for funny tshirts you should check this site out!
awesome crazy t-shirts catalog
this is the most cool t-shirts I ever seen
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check this funny t-shirts website
finally found it! crazy tshirt website with online store
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I found this great cool t-shirt site
as I promise, check this crazy t-shirt site
did you heared about this t-shirt online store?
for all the funny t-shirt lovers, check this site out!
get cool tshirt for summer 2007
highly recommended crazy tshirts website
WOW! Found this cool tshirts website
If you looking for funny tshirts you should check this site out!
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03/04-2007 | 12:48
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03/04-2007 | 13:46
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10/10-2007 | 22:30
Yuri Zakharov Says:
Thanks for your post, as for me you did everything right. I know, you don’t worry about it ;) Don’t take it closely to your heart. Black PR is also PR.
I just can’t understand why you approve spam comments. Thanks
25/10-2007 | 13:45
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