Blubs & Digital Product Ramblings
I’ve been wanting to blog about my thoughts on business models related to digital products for a while now (as you get to know a lot about the minor things that can either make or break a business - but only once you’re involved) and I’ve been postponing it for a while. But with the release of a new premium theme - Blubs (and a request from the author for a review) - I figured it would be a great opportunity to combine some of my thoughts on digital products with a review of this new theme.
The Review
First up, I must admit that I really love the design elements all over Blubs (demo here) - and it is very clear that the author (BlogPerfume) spent a lot of time tweaking the small elements all over (a great example of this, is the stylish-looking post elements i.e. blockquotes, lists, indented areas etc.). There’s also something about the footer that just rounds off a great design - I can’t put my finger on the exact reason for this, but it really compliments the rest of the design.
The theme is widget-ready, uses a fluid width (dunno if this is popular!?) and they’ve integrated some ready-made ad spaces into the sidebar already. Ray over at BlogPerfume was also kind enough to give me a copy of the theme, so I can assure you that my digging under the theme’s hood delivered no obvious bugs and the theme is really nicely coded (i.e. the code is clean, indented and commented).
As far as I could tell, the theme uses 3 plugins (which gets included in the theme’s download package once purchased) to function optimally (it thus works without them as well). The Developer’s License also comes included with the Photoshop & font files to make customisation of the theme much easier.
Overall I think Blubs will prove to be quite a popular premium theme, as the coding is obviously built on a great base and considering that it is competing in a very open market (there’s relatively few personal blog premium themes compared to magazine / CMS-like themes). But - not to criticize anyone’s work - there’s a few things that I need to highlight, which could influence the success of this theme…
So what’s lacking then!? Not much really… But…
Support & Documentation
As far as I could tell, the only support information available about Blubs is located on this post. Nothing was included in the theme package and I fear that this is a big no-no when it comes to selling digital products. If you consider that our support forum has amassed over 2000 posts in 5 months (along with the 20-odd support e-mails we get on a daily basis), it is clear that users will need help (even if their requests are really silly at times) and it is very important to provide that personal support (Brian G will attest to this, as his support forum has about 5 times that amount of posts).
I might add that Blubs is definitely less complex to set up compared to our themes, but support still needs to be available. I’m not saying that you won’t get support once you’ve purchased Blubs (maybe Ray can clarify this), but I couldn’t find an obvious source of support…
Version Compatibility
According to the information available, Blubs is only compatible with WordPress 2.5 and upwards… I tested this out on a local copy of WP 2.3.3 and it definitely didn’t work - in fact, I couldn’t even select Blubs as my chosen theme. Again, I don’t know whether this will influence the success of the theme, but I prefer to release themes that are backwards compatible (i.e. also works on older versions of WordPress - in fact, our themes should be fine on WP 2.1 and upwards).
And this is not only a WP consideration, but if you’re going to build a digitial product that needs to plug into a different platform or API, then you need to consider backwards compatibility and continued upgrades to work with future versions. Just consider that your potential customer base will all be using a variety of versions of the platform and to maximize your sales from that customer base, you need to support each of them.
Then again, simply support WP2.5 (and probably upwards) might be a masterstroke on the Blubs team’s part, as it is sometimes a real mission to troubleshoot problems on older versions of WordPress… What do you think?
Conclusion
I’ve got a few more digitial product thoughts that I’d like to share, but none of them are related to Blubs in any way. As I said in the review part of this post - I really like the theme and believe it will be widely popular (irrespective of the two “lacking aspects” that I highlighted). I am however sure - having been in contact with Ray quite a bit in the past - that the Blubs team will only learn from their first premium release and continue to grow in this regard.
For the rest of you, that’s interested in my other ramblings related to digital products; I’ll try to get a part two up later this week.
Oh… Wait! It is competition time!
Haha… I almost forgot about this… The guys over at Blubs would love your feedback about the theme and they’ve committed to giving away 3 x Developer’s Licenses (valued at $99 each) to random commentators on this post. So - shoot with your comments…
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.