jonathanleane

For those sick of reddit, I offer the following link (with some unintended irony): https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/cxb2xq/...

Also: https://ruqqus.com/

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

THC or CBD?

Can someone with a finance background explain why this is happening?

Is the issue that there is loads of money in the system with not enough productive and/or low risk opportunities to invest it, so people are basically wiling to accept close to a zero return?

Thanks. And watch that right flank!

Yeah this happens to me too. What meds, if I may ask?

We are - based in Sydney, about 5 minutes walk from town hall.

Currently looking for junior / intermediate symfony or laravel devs.

Also ux / CRO roles available, but not sure if hacker news is the right place for that :-)

Email is my first name @ alternativemedia.com.au.

Ignore the crappy website, we're currently in the process of rebranding.

Hi guys... I posted this a couple of weeks ago and it didn't get much traction. I have been working on adding functionality since then, improving the tutorial, etc...

My biggest concern at the moment is that the game isn't... well... fun.

At the moment I suppose technically its more of a simulator than a game - nothing is really gamified.

Any thoughts would be most appreciated :)

Hey thanks... Oh yeah, good point about the 'sell' buttons being deactivated by default - that makes sense.

About the portfolio when you first load the page... Yeah, it only appears when you buy your first crypto... Maybe I should have something that floats down the bottom before the player buys anything saying something like "You have $X to spend! Make your first purchase now."

Hey, not harsh at all - thanks for the feedback :)

Can you show me a rough example of what you mean about the status bar?

And any other ideas are more than welcome!

Sure, but this is presumably just a small sample of his work that he's most proud of and has self selected.

It's interesting / surprising / puzzling to me that someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating his craft and presumably knows far more about design than I do would choose to showcase something that appears to me to be a total eyesore, which makes me think I might be missing something.

Most of these are beautiful, but there are a couple that make me cringe... The Cummins one in particular (http://www.paul-rand.com/assets/gallery/identity/logo_cummin...) has a very MS Paint feel to it to my admittedly untrained eye.

Which class of anti-depressants are you talking about? I assume it's not SSRIs?

Well according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_human_population), world population in 1800 was estimated at one billion. It was estimated at 400m in 1000 AD.

So yeah, not sure where that 100 million comes from.

Same here Fabian :) Shoot me an email - jonathan@alternativemedia.com.au and let's chat.

Hi Jeff... yep, all affiliate based at the moment.

I hear you on the content marketing - I think that's a good idea. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if the theme searching / browsing component was at least as good as the incumbents.

Thanks Jay - I hear you on both points.

Actually, your second point in particular is one that has come up again and again over the last couple of months, so that will definitely be my #1 fix if I decide to persevere with this.

Also appreciate your advice re the marketing angle. The 'aggregator' aspect does seem to resonate well with people. In hindsight, perhaps I should have simply more or less copied a more conventional approach like Templatemonster, themeforest, etc., and focused more on the 'meta-search' side of things rather than trying to re-invent the ux wheel.

> 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.

Thanks for the reply. Your post initially hit me pretty hard, because to be honest I had never really considered that I might have been entering a shrinking marketplace.

But after spending some time thinking about it, I'm not sure I agree with your premise. It seems to me that a barrier to entry being reduced is more likely to lead to an increase in market size than a reduction. For example, programming, web design, video production, etc. Due to improvements in editing software, educational resources, etc., these things are more 'amateur friendly' than ever before, yet (as far as I know) there is no indication that these markets have reduced in size. On the contrary, the reduced barrier to entry seems to make people appreciate a premium offering all the more.

I do take your point though, and I could see how something like the premium wordpress theme market's growth rate could potentially be reduced because new users are shifting to non technical / newbie friendly platforms like squarespace, weebly, or wix, though I think the closed ecosystem and lack of flexibility that are inherent to these approaches will frustrate more experienced users and people looking for custom functionality. One could even make the point that these services may ultimately increase the number of Bootstrap/Wordpress/Drupal, etc. users in the same way that smartphone users often 'progress' from iOs to Android.

Haha, well thanks for not sugar coating it :)

Anyway I hear what you're saying. I agree that it's a growth market - my question about the concept being flawed was not so much about theme/template marketplaces in general, but rather on my particular execution of it.

Thanks Spyder. To address your last point first - I'm actually already doing that :) For example, if someone does a search for 'premium wordpress portfolio themes', then I would send them to something like this: http://www.themebeacon.com/landing/wordpress/portfolio/

As for your point about the grid results page - this is actually something that keeps coming up again and again, so if I do decide to persevere, that will be one of the first features I add.

The loading thing - yeah, that sucks. It's not just because you're in the EU, it's pretty much across the board. We're actually already doing the next template preloading trick, but it's still slow. The big issue is that all these themes are hosted offsite on servers that I have no control over.

Thanks for the tip on those design oriented ad networks :)

Many thanks thegrif. I'm actually quite experienced with PPC - though admittedly in completely different industries to this one - and it had occurred to me before I started that PPC was simply not a viable strategy for this particular market. Having said that, I'd still expected to get a lot closer to break-even, and the fact that more people aren't clicking through to the various theme description pages (regardless of whether they're actually buying or not) makes me think I've screwed something up on the ux side of things, particularly as the traffic coming in should be pretty highly targeted.

As I mentioned in my initial post, the fact that I personally would still use something more conventional (like themeforest) to find a new theme makes me think I am missing a crucial piece of the ux puzzle.

Sorry to hijack, but I literally just launched something very similar:

http://www.themebeacon.com/

I even posted about it to HN the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7888745) but it seemed to vanish in about 30 seconds...

Now that I've got that shameless plug out of the way...

I really like the way you have executed on this - particularly the way you show each theme's description while you load the demo page in the background. Are you just pulling themes from ThemeForest at the moment? And may I ask how you're seeding your database? Are you grabbing RSS feeds, or have you built scrapers to go out and grab data from the various description pages?

EDIT: PS, can't get your blog link to work for some reason? I'm in Chrome...

Thanks for the compliment! Any tips on what could be done better?

Re seeing this on the front page sucking, not at all - just proof that great minds think alike :) But to be honest it did suck the way my initial submission seemed to disappear so quickly. Perhaps I just posted it at an inopportune time.

Yeah, I'm almost positive you're right about the animations, etc. still loading off-screen. I'm not sure how much of this is due just to javascript stuff going on vs. loading a bunch of things at once simply being really CPU intensive.

EDIT: Might be worth investigating the (dis)allow-scripts variable of the sandbox tag? Take a look at http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-if...

Hey thanks! Re number of columns and left/right sidebar, a lot of themes are customisable in this respect (particularly the sidebar bit). I'll look into it though - it's a good point.

Re result loading... yeah :( I have tried to improve this by 'buffering' the next theme in a hidden div, but it doesn't always work.

Actually, the loading screens are really just set on timers, so sometimes 5 seconds is too long, other times it's not long enough... I initially didn't have a loading screen on there at all, but it kind of ruined the user experience a bit if someone clicked the next button and the theme hadn't even started loading - they were basically just staring at an ugly grey screen with nothing happening.

Ultimately the problem with the current approach used on both my and the OP's site is that we're really at the mercy of the servers we're loading the demo themes off. Some are super quick, others are insanely slow. I think that I may have to do as you suggested and move to some kind of a screenshot / thumbnail first system.

I like your solution too - it 'gets you to the goods' much faster :) At the moment I feel like mine sort of overpromises and underdelivers, e.g. the style and features functionality doesn't work particularly well yet.

About the pre-loading, I'm actually already doing that... But only the next one in the queue. How many were you trying to load at once? I did notice that even only pre loading one is enough to slow it down considerably on my nexus 4 though...

Sorry to hijack, but I literally just launched something very similar:

http://www.themebeacon.com/

I even posted about it to HN the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7888745) but it seemed to vanish in about 30 seconds...

Hi guys, been working on this as a bit of a side project for like 4 months or so. Still some bugs and not quite finished, but any feedback would be most welcome :)

Actually all of the Scandinavian countries have fertility rates of < 2 births per woman...

Hard to believe they couldn't have made a go of this.

The 'WebMonkey' brand has a decent amount of cred - why doesn't Wired try to transition it into a proven model, like the Envato 'Tuts' sites?

I guess if they've already tried to resurrect it several times (as the article states) and still couldn't pull it off, I must be missing something.

Still, seems a shame...