WP Business Ep. 04: Planning a second theme shop

In this series I give insights into my WordPress theme business and report on ideas, plans, challenges and activities of the last month. In WP Business Ep. 04 for June 2018 I tell a little about my planning to launch a second theme shop.

You can find all episodes of the series in the My WordPress Business category .

A new theme shop in 2018?

Oh yes, I actually plan to start a second theme shop in 2018. Ten years after the first commercial theme providers started and the theme market has been shrinking because sophisticated page builder plugins and gigantic all-in-one themes are nibbling on the sales of smaller theme shops.

Google Trends also shows, for example, that the highest level of interest in the search term WordPress Themes was in the years 2010 to 2012, after which it went steadily downhill.

Still, I think now is a good time for new projects.

WordPress is facing a major change with Gutenberg. Themes in particular will change fundamentally and in a few years will probably be completely based on blocks. For theme developers, this entails many challenges, but also new opportunities.

I assume that themes will become lighter and that many options and templates will be replaced by content blocks. The market will also change as a result, and many providers will increasingly offer blocks for specific applications in addition to themes.

But why a new shop instead of expanding OneTheme.com?

For that I have to go back a little ...

Alignment of my first theme shop

In the first few years of my theme shop , I offered pretty much all categories of themes, that is, business, blogging and magazine themes. At that time, eCommerce themes were still not widely used, as wooCommerce was just in its starting blocks.

My slogan was Freemium WordPress Themes, as this screenshot from 2013 shows.

At the end of 2014 there was a specialization and thematic focus on magazine themes .

My new focus on news portals and online magazines had very pragmatic reasons. At that time, I achieved most sales (> 80%) with Dynamic News and Smartline, which were geared towards editorial websites with extra Magazine Post Widgets.

In addition, WordPress.org tightened the rules for so-called content creation. So that users can easily change the design, no content should be saved in the theme. Contents such as services, testimonials or portfolios are practically not allowed to be displayed as widgets or theme options. The well-known theme Zerif was also suspended due to these rules and was banned from WordPress.org until the violations were rectified.

In contrast to business themes, magazine themes were therefore possible without additional plugins or page builders, because these only displayed posts in different magazine layouts and therefore no content had to be created in the theme.

Return to business themes

But the desire to create a business theme again has never completely let me go.

As I am self-employed and generally find entrepreneurship exciting, it is really great to be able to help other entrepreneurs with their online presence. This still often happens today because my magazine themes are often misused for business websites.

Of course, themes that are directly geared towards the requirements of small and medium-sized companies would be better for this. I've had ideas in the back of my mind for years.

With Gutenberg, the time has come to put the plans into practice.

Due to the orientation and target group of OneTheme, it only makes sense to open a completely independent and second theme shop for business themes. I will of course report on the journey to the launch here 🙂