Selling WordPress businesses

May 20, 2014 by

The WordPress economy is maturing now and we are starting to see more acuisitions, mergers and sale of whole line of products and brands.

DevPress and Themelab got sold out recently.

Press75 tried selling unsuccessfully through Flippa

https://flippa.com/3056892-pr-6-site-with-13-621-uniques-mo-making-5-268-mo-selling-wordpress-themes

The interesting part is none of the guys are selling them at the peak of their business unlike how software companies do.

When you are trying to sell when you are no more interested in the product, the recurring revenue is in a declining trend and doesn’t get the prices these products truly deserve.

Who knows?

The future might see more such ventures.

Filed Under: General

Tips for Better Freelancing

May 20, 2014 by

Some tips for better freelancing from my experience

1. Focus

Focus on working in a niche and developing your skill sets, client base in that field. Don’t jump at every new technology or quote beyond your specializion.

Sometimes, it can be too tempting to over specialize too. Resist that. Always try to keep various doors open with a particular area of focus.

2. Invest

Invest on the right tools, learning and training resources. This can give an edge over others who hesitate to do that. At the same time, don’t go overboard shopping for these things. Especially, when you have all those Black friday deals :)

3. Be consistent

Clients don’t expect you to be a superman but they expect you to be consistent. So, it is your choice to set your standards and stick to them.

Stay tune for more updates…

Filed Under: General

WordPress and business opportunities

May 30, 2013 by

I gave a talk on WordPress and business opportunities at the Open Weekends event at Chennai on May 25th, 2013. I explained the WordPress ecosystem comprising of premium themes and plugins, managed and hosted services and freelancing opportunities with WordPress. I followed it with a demo of using WordPress insisting on the use case that WordPress is just not a blog but a CMS that can be extended with custom post types. I was quite surprised that only a handful of the quite knowledgeable crowd were aware of WordPress software. Awareness about WordPress.com was better. [Read more…]

Filed Under: WordPress Events

WordPress 10th anniversary celebration at Coimbatore

May 30, 2013 by
WordPress birthday cake :)

WordPress birthday cake :)

I went for the WordPress 10th anniversary celebration at Coimbatore. The event was organized by Lakshmanan of AGT Electronics India, who has developed a popular plugin for feeding Facebook pages to WordPress. Though the attendance was low (Coimbatore is indeed a busy city with lot of web development agencies but those who engage and contribute to the community are not so many), we had a good discussion on everything WordPress and resolved to develop a tech community in the city.

Participants in the WordPress 10th anniversary celebration at Coimbatore.

Participants in the WordPress 10th anniversary celebration at Coimbatore.

WordPress powers one-fifth of the Internet today and provides business opportunities for thousands of developers all over the world. Personally, I have done nothing but WordPress for the last 5 years for my livelihood. And it is the time to say: “Thank you, WordPress.”

Filed Under: WordPress Events

WordPress Theme Frameworks and Starter Themes

December 16, 2012 by

_s or underscores

Underscores is a starter theme for WordPress made by Automattic claiming to provide a 1000 hours head start. It is a theme meant for hacking and best not used as a parent theme.

Here’s what’s currently in _s:

  • A just right amount of lean, well-commented, modern, HTML5 templates.
  • A helpful 404 template.
  • A sample custom header implementation in inc/custom-header.php that can be activated by uncommenting one line in functions.php and adding the code snippet found in the comments of inc/custom-header.php to your header.php template.
  • Custom template tags in inc/template-tags that keep your templates clean and neat and prevent code duplication.
  • Sample theme options in /inc/theme-options/ that can can be activated by uncommenting one line in functions.php.
  • Some small tweaks in /inc/tweaks.php that can improve your theming experience. They can be activated by uncommenting one line in functions.php.
  • Keyboard navigation for image attachment templates. The script can be found injs/keyboard-navigation.js and is enqueued from the image attachment template, image.php.
  • A script at js/small-menu.js that makes your menu a toggled dropdown for small screens (like your phone) ready for CSS artistry. It’s enqueued in functions.php.
  • 5 sample CSS layouts in /layouts: Two sidebars on the left, two sidebars on the right, a sidebar on either side of your content, and two-column layouts with sidebars on either side.
  • Smartly organized starter CSS in style.css that will help you to quickly get your design off the ground.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: WordPress Themes