WordPress.com Themes and Team
April 15, 2010
WordPress.com now has an official Theme Team, according to Ian Stewart of said team. There’s an impressive manifesto, starting with:
Every WordPress.com user should feel like there’s a theme that fits them perfectly.
My first reaction was that means highly customizable themes, and some of the discussion in comments on Ian’s post supports that.
Ian also mentions “web standards,” which I of course support. I’m hoping that new themes will also adhere to some kind of “WordPress theme standard.” For example, new themes should all the same html tag for post titles. Consistency would make a lot of things easier: changing themes when you have the CSS upgrade; responding to some of the posts in the WordPress.com forums; applying Typekit to WordPress.com blogs.
I’ll follow the work of the theme team with interest. I’m happy with Simpla, as CSS’d and widget’d for this blog, but I could be tempted by a clean, customizable theme.
To be more specific, it’s been added to the domain mapping extra for WordPress.com. Domain mapping is the reason you see this blog as changingway.org, rather than as changingway.wordpress.com (which it also is). It’s also the reason you can email me (as andrew) at changingway.org.
With the addition of DNS editing, domain mapping is also the reason you can see other outposts of the changingway.org empire. Or rather, it would be if there were such outposts. Right now there aren’t: there’s just blog and email.
Andy Skelton, posting for Automattic, explains DNS editing as follows. “The ability to add some common DNS records (MX, TXT, CNAME, A) opens the door for services hosted elsewhere to work under the same domain as your blog.” He uses the examples of email (already available, but I think that DNS editing makes it more flexibly available) and wikis.
Another aspect of Andy’s explanation is interesting: “we tired of saying “no” to users wanting email on their blog domains so we added limited support for Google-hosted email… we tired of saying “no” to users wanting DNS control so today we deployed a DNS editor.”
So Automattic can get tired of saying no, and enhance a product so that the answer is yes. I’m explicit about this because some seem to doubt that it ever happens.
On the other hand, Automattic will keep on saying no to the “make everything free of charge” requests that seem to follow its every move. Andy refers to DNS editing as a “free enhancement,” and it is – but it’s an enhancement to a premium (as in costs money) feature. DNS editing will make the domain mapping feature more valuable to some.
Freemium and Fencing
March 14, 2010
Freemium mashes up free and premium:you can use a freemium service, such as WordPress.com, at zero cost; you can pay for premium features. I pay to add two such features for this blog. One of the features maps the domain changingway.org to changingway.wordpress.com.
The other paid feature I use is custom CSS (see one of this blog’s first posts for an account of how I use it).
The fence between zero and any positive cost is perceived as high. So some users of freemium services seek means of effectively getting a premium feature without paying the price for it: these “loophole-lookers” seek holes in the fence.
The WordPress.com custom CSS upgrade seems particularly prone to attract loophole-lookers. I base this mainly on posts in the WordPress.com support forums, some of which include arguments such as: some other hosted blogging services don’t charge for CSS; I only want a little bit of CSS, so why should I be hit with the full charge?
One particular forum thread started about a week ago with a question about changing the background color of a theme. Responses so far include:
- You need custom CSS to change the background color.
- No you don’t. Here’s some code you can include in a text widget to style the background color of the whole blog.
- That loophole is going away soon.
The 3rd response is particularly interesting because it’s by Matt Mullenweg. He does use the word loophole.
This raises the question of how WordPress.com will change with respect to inline styling. And indeed, that question has its own forum thread.
I hope that WordPress.com will not, as one response in the thread suggests, use the blunt instrument of stripping out all inline style attributes. I think it would be reasonable to allow the occasional use of inline styling for things like using a font or image positioning appropriate to a particular post.
It would also be interesting to watch. The fence between free of charge and paying for custom CSS would see a fencing match. WordPress.com will plug the loophole of style code in a widget to style the whole blog. The riposte might involve putting similar code in a sticky post.
What do you think WordPress.com will do? What do you think it should do? I’d welcome comments addressing either or both of those different questions.
WordPress.com Downtime Lowdown
February 18, 2010
This blog, like millions of others, is hosted at WordPress.com. I’ve been very happy with the service.
I’m still happy with it, despite today’s downtime. I have to applaud Matt’s downtime summary. He didn’t attempt to downplay the downtime. He quantified it, to the tune of 5.5 million lost pageviews (not all of which are mine, I must admit).
I had to smile when I first saw the news about the downtime. It was a Mashable post about “tweets pouring in.” That just reinforced to me how much more robust WordPress.com is than Twitter, which I still think functions best as the home for the fail whale.
WordPress and Google Buzz
February 15, 2010
Google Buzz is a platlication: it’s both an application and a platform on which applications can be built. It’s been a busy application, seeing millions of people and posts in its first couple of days.
It’s also been a busy platform. I have a particular interest in the applications that bridge Buzz and WordPress. So does Mashable, as we can see from today’s post. It’s mainly a roundup of the plugins that put Google Buzz buttons on self-hosted WordPress blogs. As such, it doesn’t live up to its title: HOW TO: Integrate Google Buzz Into Your WordPress Blog.
I’m interested in an aspect of blog/buzz integration that the Mashable post doesn’t cover: having my WordPress posts show up in Google Buzz. There is a way to do this that works both with blogs hosted at WordPress.com (as this one currently is) and with WordPress blogs hosted elsewhere (such as Andrew’s Wanderings).
In short: you tell Google Webmaster Tools that you own the blog in question; then Google Buzz will allow you to add the blog to your list of connected sites. I found out about this at the WordPress.com forums, which in turn linked to an amusingly untitled blog for details.
By the way, there does seem to be a way of putting a Google Buzz button in a post at WordPress.com, but I haven’t tried it.
WordPress.com Builds Inroads
February 9, 2010
WordPress.com has recently added a couple of inbound highways. A couple of weeks ago, Brian Colinger announced the Vox importer. Today, he announced the Posterous importer.
The particularly interesting thing about these two roads is that they come from very different directions. Hence the implication is that wherever you are, WordPress.com might be a better place for you. Vox bills itself as “everything you want in a blog.” I don’t think that it has lived up to Six Apart’s hopes for it.
Posterous, on the other hand, bills itself as “the dead simple place to post everything.” As Jennifer Van Grove points out at Mashable, Posterous has offered an import from WordPress for some time.
I’d be interested to see a traffic report on export/import and migration between the various blogging and other social media services.
Conversion Rates and Funnels
February 7, 2010
The freemium model relies on enough users paying for premium services to meet the cost of servicing all users, including those who use take the free option. One of the key metrics for a freemium service is conversion rate from free to premium.
Toni Schneider notes that this rate is about 2% for WordPress.com, for Box.net, for Evernote, and for many other freemium services. He wonders if there is some kind of “2% rule” at work.
This reminded me of Funnel Analysis, as described in a Mashable guest post by Tim Trefren. Funnel analysis is about conversion rates, is a more general sense. A funnel is defined in terms of user actions, such as visiting a site, signing up for a service, becoming a premium/pay user, and so on.
Conversion rate, in this broader sense, is the percentage of users taking a particular action. Hence a firm’s funnel has multiple conversion rates/actions as it narrows. A freemium service using funnel analysis would probably define a payment action, marking the transition from a free user to a premium customer.
Tim is CEO of Mixpanel, a web analytics startup. (See Mixpanel for more about Funnel Analysis and the API.) Mixpanel itself uses the freemium model; I signed up for a free account.
Funnels can be transparent: a firm can publish its conversion rates. Funnels could be aggregated: Mixpanel could, with the cooperation of its client firms, publish aggregate data on various conversion rates. It could make it worth the clients’ while by, for example, offering early or deep looks at the aggregated data.
I Love to Say: I Told You So
February 2, 2010
I noticed a few months ago that the URL for an official Android app was in use, although hidden from public view. Well, we now have lift-off.
I’m using the new app to post this. I’ll edit to add links later.
Now, getting to the post on a laptop, I’m surprised to find that it wasn’t published. I thought I’d told the Android app to publish, not just to upload. It did seem to be working with a local, and locally-savable copy, which is good. Anyway, as threatened, here are some links:
- The post at Mashable where I first saw the news today, and from which I’m borrowing the WordDroid image.
- The announcement post on the WordPress for Android blog.
Popular Themes at WordPress.com
February 1, 2010
Which WordPress themes are most widely used? That question is broad and difficult to answer. Luckily, there are related questions that are more focused and easier to answer. For example: which themes are most popular at WordPress.com? which have the most downloads from WordPress.org?
This post is about the answer to the first of these more specific questions. If I, as an admin of this or any other WordPress.com blog, browse themes I can request that the themes be ordered by popularity.
This is the current list of most popular themes at WordPress.com: ChaoticSoul, MistyLook, Ocean Mist, Cutline, Freshy, Black-LetterHead, Contempt, Ambiru, Digg 3 Column, Benevolence, Tarski, Andreas04, Solipsus, Blix, Rounded, and PressRow.
The first thing that struck me was the absence of Kubrick, which has been the default theme for new WordPress blogs for a while now. I suspect that there are indeed many Kubrick blogs, created but never really used, that the popularity algorithm excludes. I’ll add that Contempt is a close relative of Kubrick.
Second, it looks as though the typical popular theme has a custom header, and a sidebar on the right.
Third, only 3 or these 16 themes – Black-LetterHead, Tarski, and Blix – are currently in the free themes directory at WordPress.org. That’s unfortunate, since it’s particularly easy to install a theme from that directory at a self-hosted WordPress blog: you don’t need to leave the dashboard to use FTP.
I started looking into the initial question (Which WordPress themes are most widely used?) when I realized that using Typekit with WordPress is very theme-specific.
