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Show HN : My weekend(s) project - Strapfolio

36 points by anujkk 14y ago

mikesilvis 14y ago
Looks great!
markyc 14y ago
looking great, consider bundling 5 clean, professional looking themes/designs with it and you'll probably touch even closer to home
- anujkk 14y ago
  by themes/designs you mean skins? That's the plan. I will provide as many different skins as possible and I'm also looking to integrate it completely with twitter/github/flickr/youtube/etc. Besides that I may also provide a visiting card psd matching the look & feel of theme as a freebie. Right now, I was itching to launch it so I did it with very basic version. Please provide suggestions on how else to improve it?
  - markyc 14y ago
    yes, that's what i meant. great v 1.0 man! keep iterating on it, and start collecting emails and talk to users/customers to get a feel of what they need you're doing great!
svachalek 14y ago
Have you tried this in mobile browsers? Looks a bit broken on my iPhone.
- anujkk 14y ago
  Yes and I know it will not work well in mobile devices. As of now, this theme supports only desktop and tablets. I will try to add some responsiveness if possible.
Alan01252 14y ago
Looks really good. In fact I'm kind of envious, the base theme already looks better than what I was able to create using the same stack. A couple of very minor things: The buy now button has an alert attached to it. The documentation is great, but it suggests that you have to create / install the plug-ins by yourself? If that's true it would put me off buying. Hope that helps. p.s It might be worth enabling the responsive features of bootstrap on the main site. It works well on the demo.
- anujkk 14y ago
  Thanks a lot. I fixed that alert message. I forgot to remove it before uploading my files to server. You don't need to create any plugin. Also, you don't need to install any plugin by yourself except contact form 7 plugin (a 3rd party plugin). All you need to do is to copy/paste some static HTML in wordpress pages. I'm looking to provide a content import file for this in next version. I was struggling with adjusting the screenshot image size when I used bootstrap responsive features on main site. It was looking ugly and I wasn't having much free time. So, I used the default 960px fixed layout.
webbruce 14y ago
This is a good start, I would definitely find a designer friend to help out on the frontend.
- anujkk 14y ago
  Sorry. I didn't get you. Are you suggesting me to get some designer or you are talking about yourself?
codegeek 14y ago
Looks good. One thing to mention: the demo page at http://demo.strapfolio.com/ http://demo.strapfolio.com/ does not render the stylesheets correctly in IE8.
- anujkk 14y ago
  Mind telling what's the issue? I find it working fine on IE8, except the fact that round corners aren't working. Twitter Bootstrap doesn't support round corners because IE8 doesn't provide support for the CSS3 property and pseudo-class border-radius and :nth-child.
ivanbernat 14y ago
You know Gmail ignores dots in usernames? > anuj (dot) kk (at) gmail (dot) com This is a bit hard on the eyes so try it as anujkk (at) gmail (dot) com. Also, Gmail has good spam filters :)
- anujkk 14y ago
  I wasn't aware about that. Updated.
bluetidepro 14y ago
Don't get me wrong, it isn't a bad design but I think your price point may be a bit high for what other competitors sell their high quality WordPress themes for. $30 can buy you a much more robust (custom -- not Bootstrap) theme on sites like http://themeforest.net http://themeforest.net, http://www.mojo-themes.com http://www.mojo-themes.com, http://www.woothemes.com http://www.woothemes.com, etc. You may want to look at bringing your price down slightly to compete with those bigger markets.
- anujkk 14y ago
  How much you think is a good price for this?
  - bluetidepro 14y ago
    Honestly, since a lot of it is built on top of Bootstrap, which probably sped up your development time and would also speed up someone trying to replicate it themselves. I would say closer to the $15-$20 range would make it much more enticing to people who know about those other sites.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
      - rshlo 14y ago
        I really think that you might want to give it for free in a "Beta phase". Get some traction, add features and design and then charge for it. As said before there are much more robust themes for $10 more.
        wtvanhest 14y ago
        I'm going to take a counter argument here and say competition is already really high so if you compete on price you are heading toward zero quickly which is a price point that will generate zero revenue. Your alternative could be charging $50 (or more) and trying to optimize your marketing funnel with the goal being to attract those too lazy to search for another word press theme. Going beyond that, non developers find wordpress to be somewhat difficult to implement, making it easy would generate additional interest. Its easy to say "lower your price", but that has a probability of not working and simply lowering your revenue/profit.
onko 14y ago
Have you made any sales yet?
- anujkk 14y ago
  Only 4 but I would still consider it a mini success that in 2-3 hours it got 8K+ visits, 45% trying demo and 8% clicking buy button. What I don't understand is when they are clicking buy button why aren't they actually completing the transaction? Is gumroad turning them off or the HN crowd is just testing if buy button actually works. :)
  - onko 14y ago
    Nice, congrats! And yeah, I clicked it just to see what payment processor you're using.. :)
    - loceng 14y ago
      We're geeks I tell you --- geeks!!
    - jamespollack 14y ago
      ditto wanted to see where it went. a stripe button would be better than gumroad
      - anujkk 14y ago
        I am unable to use stripe as I'm not from US and I don't have a bank account there. Gumroad itself uses stripe and pays the 2.9% + 30 cents a transaction. It keeps the rest - 2.1%
anujkk 14y ago
Some analytics for last 4 hours(time since posting it to HN) : 4898 total unique visitors. 1567 clicked demo button. 87 clicked buy button (but not completed transaction) 72 checked documentation 28 clicked on screenshot 4 completed sale.
- JoelMarsh 14y ago
  Senior UX guy here... free advice: 1) Your demo button is killing your sales. The drop between step 2 and 3 of your stats is the proof, although I immediately noticed the problem: People don't go "back" to make a sale, they go forward. When they click your demo button, they no longer have a call to action button to lead them to the sale. Recommendation: add a top bar that stays with them as they check out the demo. Regardless of how you solve this, it's worth losing sleep over it. 2) Changing the demo content (text) to be about the theme itself. At least in the intro paragraph. I found it very disorienting after clicking the demo button. 3) Pick 3 selling points, not 9. The first one should almost convince me by itself. Make them bigger and more visual. The rest are just extras. Make them look like extras. 4) Remember that you're selling design to designers. There are beautiful Wordpress themes that are free. Yours looks ok, but not $30 ok. ;) TELL ME WHY I LOVE THIS, and tell me in the first sentence. 5) Screenshots suck. Use the image to show me or teach me something I need to understand about this product. Better yet, get a really nice background image and fill that baby blue area with it. Add some emotion, man! 6) By pitching it based on Underscores and Bootstrap you're immediately selling to a technical audience. In my experience, visual creatives are not particularly technical. Why is bootstrap good? What is Underscores? etc. 7) A/B test versions with and without the price in the buy button. You include the price when it makes the product more appealing. Yours is high. the A/B test will give you a very rough idea of how much effect that has on conversion. 8) Include the demo / buy links in the header of your documentation. Beside the logo, not in the top-right corner.
  - anujkk 14y ago
    These are some very good advice. Thanks. In coming weekends, I will make improvements suggested by you and everybody else to improve both the offering and landing page.
abhi1983 14y ago
Looks great

36 points by anujkk 14y ago

Looks great!

looking great, consider bundling 5 clean, professional looking themes/designs with it and you'll probably touch even closer to home

anujkk 14y ago
by themes/designs you mean skins? That's the plan. I will provide as many different skins as possible and I'm also looking to integrate it completely with twitter/github/flickr/youtube/etc. Besides that I may also provide a visiting card psd matching the look & feel of theme as a freebie. Right now, I was itching to launch it so I did it with very basic version. Please provide suggestions on how else to improve it?
- markyc 14y ago
  yes, that's what i meant. great v 1.0 man! keep iterating on it, and start collecting emails and talk to users/customers to get a feel of what they need you're doing great!

svachalek 14y ago

Have you tried this in mobile browsers? Looks a bit broken on my iPhone.

anujkk 14y ago
Yes and I know it will not work well in mobile devices. As of now, this theme supports only desktop and tablets. I will try to add some responsiveness if possible.

Alan01252 14y ago

Looks really good. In fact I'm kind of envious, the base theme already looks better than what I was able to create using the same stack. A couple of very minor things: The buy now button has an alert attached to it. The documentation is great, but it suggests that you have to create / install the plug-ins by yourself? If that's true it would put me off buying. Hope that helps. p.s It might be worth enabling the responsive features of bootstrap on the main site. It works well on the demo.

anujkk 14y ago
Thanks a lot. I fixed that alert message. I forgot to remove it before uploading my files to server. You don't need to create any plugin. Also, you don't need to install any plugin by yourself except contact form 7 plugin (a 3rd party plugin). All you need to do is to copy/paste some static HTML in wordpress pages. I'm looking to provide a content import file for this in next version. I was struggling with adjusting the screenshot image size when I used bootstrap responsive features on main site. It was looking ugly and I wasn't having much free time. So, I used the default 960px fixed layout.

webbruce 14y ago

This is a good start, I would definitely find a designer friend to help out on the frontend.

anujkk 14y ago
Sorry. I didn't get you. Are you suggesting me to get some designer or you are talking about yourself?

codegeek 14y ago

Looks good. One thing to mention: the demo page at http://demo.strapfolio.com/ http://demo.strapfolio.com/ does not render the stylesheets correctly in IE8.

anujkk 14y ago
Mind telling what's the issue? I find it working fine on IE8, except the fact that round corners aren't working. Twitter Bootstrap doesn't support round corners because IE8 doesn't provide support for the CSS3 property and pseudo-class border-radius and :nth-child.

ivanbernat 14y ago

You know Gmail ignores dots in usernames? > anuj (dot) kk (at) gmail (dot) com This is a bit hard on the eyes so try it as anujkk (at) gmail (dot) com. Also, Gmail has good spam filters :)

anujkk 14y ago
I wasn't aware about that. Updated.

bluetidepro 14y ago

Don't get me wrong, it isn't a bad design but I think your price point may be a bit high for what other competitors sell their high quality WordPress themes for. $30 can buy you a much more robust (custom -- not Bootstrap) theme on sites like http://themeforest.net http://themeforest.net, http://www.mojo-themes.com http://www.mojo-themes.com, http://www.woothemes.com http://www.woothemes.com, etc. You may want to look at bringing your price down slightly to compete with those bigger markets.

anujkk 14y ago
How much you think is a good price for this?
- bluetidepro 14y ago
  Honestly, since a lot of it is built on top of Bootstrap, which probably sped up your development time and would also speed up someone trying to replicate it themselves. I would say closer to the $15-$20 range would make it much more enticing to people who know about those other sites.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
    - rshlo 14y ago
      I really think that you might want to give it for free in a "Beta phase". Get some traction, add features and design and then charge for it. As said before there are much more robust themes for $10 more.
      - wtvanhest 14y ago
        I'm going to take a counter argument here and say competition is already really high so if you compete on price you are heading toward zero quickly which is a price point that will generate zero revenue. Your alternative could be charging $50 (or more) and trying to optimize your marketing funnel with the goal being to attract those too lazy to search for another word press theme. Going beyond that, non developers find wordpress to be somewhat difficult to implement, making it easy would generate additional interest. Its easy to say "lower your price", but that has a probability of not working and simply lowering your revenue/profit.

onko 14y ago

Have you made any sales yet?

anujkk 14y ago
Only 4 but I would still consider it a mini success that in 2-3 hours it got 8K+ visits, 45% trying demo and 8% clicking buy button. What I don't understand is when they are clicking buy button why aren't they actually completing the transaction? Is gumroad turning them off or the HN crowd is just testing if buy button actually works. :)
- onko 14y ago
  Nice, congrats! And yeah, I clicked it just to see what payment processor you're using.. :)
  - loceng 14y ago
    We're geeks I tell you --- geeks!!
  - jamespollack 14y ago
    ditto wanted to see where it went. a stripe button would be better than gumroad
    - anujkk 14y ago
      I am unable to use stripe as I'm not from US and I don't have a bank account there. Gumroad itself uses stripe and pays the 2.9% + 30 cents a transaction. It keeps the rest - 2.1%

anujkk 14y ago

Some analytics for last 4 hours(time since posting it to HN) : 4898 total unique visitors. 1567 clicked demo button. 87 clicked buy button (but not completed transaction) 72 checked documentation 28 clicked on screenshot 4 completed sale.

JoelMarsh 14y ago
Senior UX guy here... free advice: 1) Your demo button is killing your sales. The drop between step 2 and 3 of your stats is the proof, although I immediately noticed the problem: People don't go "back" to make a sale, they go forward. When they click your demo button, they no longer have a call to action button to lead them to the sale. Recommendation: add a top bar that stays with them as they check out the demo. Regardless of how you solve this, it's worth losing sleep over it. 2) Changing the demo content (text) to be about the theme itself. At least in the intro paragraph. I found it very disorienting after clicking the demo button. 3) Pick 3 selling points, not 9. The first one should almost convince me by itself. Make them bigger and more visual. The rest are just extras. Make them look like extras. 4) Remember that you're selling design to designers. There are beautiful Wordpress themes that are free. Yours looks ok, but not $30 ok. ;) TELL ME WHY I LOVE THIS, and tell me in the first sentence. 5) Screenshots suck. Use the image to show me or teach me something I need to understand about this product. Better yet, get a really nice background image and fill that baby blue area with it. Add some emotion, man! 6) By pitching it based on Underscores and Bootstrap you're immediately selling to a technical audience. In my experience, visual creatives are not particularly technical. Why is bootstrap good? What is Underscores? etc. 7) A/B test versions with and without the price in the buy button. You include the price when it makes the product more appealing. Yours is high. the A/B test will give you a very rough idea of how much effect that has on conversion. 8) Include the demo / buy links in the header of your documentation. Beside the logo, not in the top-right corner.
- anujkk 14y ago
  These are some very good advice. Thanks. In coming weekends, I will make improvements suggested by you and everybody else to improve both the offering and landing page.

abhi1983 14y ago

Looks great