Hi guys. I spent the better part of this year developing and launching my unique take on a theme/template search site.<p>The result was Themebeacon (www.themebeacon.com).<p>I launched a trial Adwords campaign several weeks ago, and the results thus far have been pretty discouraging to say the least. The short version is that for every dollar spent on PPC, I'm making only about 10 cents back in actual sales.<p>Is the concept itself flawed? As a semi-regular theme buyer, I find myself reverting to more conventional theme search websites rather than using my own creation. I can't tell if this is because the concept itself is fundamentally flawed, or if the ux just needs a bit more refinement.<p>Any feedback or advice would be most appreciated.
Your website is pretty bad.<p>Look at your competitor (<a href="http://themeforest.net" rel="nofollow">http://themeforest.net</a>). From the second you arrive you are seeing possible themes to try and buy. There is no "How It Works" section because you instantly know how it works. Your site forces you to think about what you are looking for before being able to see options. It's exhausting. And as someone who has spent hundreds at Envato I would never use it.<p>The concept is NOT flawed. Envato is a massively successful company and as web sites become more complex sites like yours will be increasingly relied on. It's a growth market.<p>So: Fix your site. Model yourself on Apple's App Store. Have a popular section, comments/reviews, curated themes, everything visible on one page.
I agree with others who said that the site looks good, but it may be better to show a grid of themes immediately on the first page, and then using the filters would narrow what is shown. Currently users need a minimum of 3 clicks before they see any of the themes (in worst case they need 9 clicks when they specify each 4 category). That's maybe not a huge issue but it could be improved even just by showing some themes after the first category is selected, then narrow the list after the other filters are changed.<p>Another thing i noticed is the loading animation before showing the themes. It may be a little slow because I'm viewing it from the EU and the servers are in US, but it could be improved a little if the next template would be preloaded after the current one is loaded, or even when the filters are already selected but the "Show templates" button isn't clicked yet.<p>For advertising you could try the more design-oriented ad networks:
<a href="http://vandelaydesign.com/ad-networks/" rel="nofollow">http://vandelaydesign.com/ad-networks/</a><p>And in your AdWords campaign you could create ads with more specific keywords that are linking to a page with prefilled filters, for example: users who come from a "Responsive Wordpress themes" ad would have to click only on the "Show themes" because the filters are already set for them on your page. And also more specific keywords could cost less than general more competitive keywords (but specific keywords has less volume so you need to create more of these keyword combinations to get more traffic).
I think the site is definitely slick, but I have two main problems with this:<p>1. The site doesn't really add much value on top of existing template sites that already have a search feature. In some cases an even more feature full one.<p>I think for me the value would be in not having so many filtering options but actually less. Build something smart that figures out why I want without me having to make many different selections. Reduce the options.<p>2. Even if you do that, is the market for templates that big and is what you're building hard enough to replicate that the template sites won't copy it immediately if it succeeds?<p>aka. are you solving a real problem? or is this solving a problem that doesn't exist?<p>I don't buy templates but I'd guess the market is fairly small and most template buyers aren't recurring buyers.<p>---<p>So what do you do - I think you should explore what you've built and look for something you can salvage. Then apply it to a real problem.
I think it's your UX. You have two big flaws:<p>1) You don't have a search. You have four filters, three of them with over 20 choices each. You've well over quadrupled the number of choices a visitor has to make before they see any results.<p>2) You don't let me quickly browse a list or grid of themes. You show themes one at a time, which feels like the slowest possible way for me to find a theme.<p>If you can fix your UX, something I'd think about for your marketing is talking about how many additional (quality) themes people will get a chance to see. I buy or recommend themes to buy for clients pretty often, and I pretty much only go to ThemeForest. My impression is they have the largest collection. If you can convince me I'm going to get a lot more good options, from one place, and be able to evaluate them as easily as I can on themeforest (reviews, Wordpress & browser version support, etc.), I'd be interested.
Hi,<p>The site seems pretty slick - you've obviously spent a lot of time on this, not just thrown something together over the weekend.<p>Are you all affiliate-based? I usually just go to ThemeForest when I want to buy something, and while I hate their browse (why would I want to see some logo for the theme instead of a thumbnail??), it does basically work.<p>I think you need to focus on content marketing and building an email list, so that you have some kind of community around your site (like DesignModo does). I don't think the theme search is enough to pull in customers, especially because you'll need to rely on organic search and not PPC if the margins just aren't there.<p>FWIW, I own www.themepuppy.com, which was originally meant to be a gallery of commercial Drupal themes, but that's not really much of a market, so I'm not using it right now.
Most of the other commenters have focused on whether the business is viable - but it may just be you need to try a different marketing tactic. Paid search is very difficult to turn an ROI on. I ran a search consultancy for awhile and I would tell people that PPC was a lot like blackjack - you can lose a lot of money if you're not paying attention or are new to the game.<p>The big players like themeforest are going to enjoy higher conversion rates off their paid traffic because (a) they are well-known and (b) they also rank well organically (there have been multiple quantitate studies examining the correlation of high converting paid search campaigns with high organic search rankings).<p>Try a few other marketing vehicles, get more data, and only then make decisions about what to do next.
Any startup takes time to get traction, regardless of whether it is unique or a different way to do what other sites are doing.<p>Google AirBnB 1000 days and you will see that what is perceived as overnight success is in all reality years of hard work and struggle for people to "get it".<p>Unless you have taken on venture capital or mortgaged yourself into bankruptcy, keep working on it and improving what people click on and get rid of what people don't click on.<p>Overnight success takes years.
As things get easier for most people to do on their own, the value of
the task decreases. At one point, putting something on the web meant
needing to know how to compile, install, configure and connect a server,
as well as how to manually write correct HTML code. These days, we often
just type out some text, and click "submit".<p>Just like everything else, theme creation (configuration) will continue
to get easier for most people to do on their own. As the barrier to
entry is reduced, the market for themes will be reduced.<p>Can you think of any recent advancements enabling most people to create
or configure their own themes more easily?
I like your site. It looks nice. I think the big thing your missing is a grid or list view. Paging over all the themes one by one seems like a pain. Don' give up! keep going!<p>Few more points:<p>-You need to make it clear what filters are selected.<p>-You need to make it easy to change the filters.<p>-I love the feature where you can try it on multiple screen size/ devices (thats killer)<p>-There are too many pop-ups and animation for my liking<p>-Its a bit slow (maybe bcs of HN traffic)