Sunday, March 25, 2012

WordPress Update

So I'm trying to start a web design business with a friend, using WordPress. Over the past couple days, I've finally had a bunch of free time, so I've been reading a lot on how WordPress actually works. Turns out, Thesis is just a theme, not a tool to edit other themes. The only difference is that it's very easy to edit using checkboxes and things, without touching code. That's really the only benefit, that one pays 80 bucks for. 80 bucks, for every website. Or 160 for a dev license plus 40 per site. I really don't think it's worth it.

In fact paying for any premium theme to edit and resell to a client doesn't seem to be worth it. The real money is in MAKING the themes from scratch. And that's what I've been trying to figure out how to do. I've had limited success already though, actually. I went through a from scratch tutorial, and managed to create a whole new theme. Looks terrible, it's some white boxes with black borders. But it works, and it pulls the info from WordPress. Posts and pages. Then last night I built a nav bar with dropdown menus and added it, and it grabs the entries from WordPress successfully as well.

If I can get good at this, it's something I might switch over to focusing on full time. A prebuilt WordPress site goes for $700. A custom built one can run up to $1000-$2000. For personal sites. And when I get good, it won't take much longer to build it using WordPress than it does using static HTML, which means a couple weeks. Could certainly pay for my last semester. Sadly though, the URL I want if I ever started a company myself, 79 Design Co, is taken. 79design.com actually just got renewed, doesn't end until next march.
 

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