Majority of WordPress theme authors are business people
This is a response to the following tweet. It cannot be explained in 140 characters, hence this post.
tl;dr — we’re talking about the WordPress theme authors and when to ship themes.
Majority authors are not business people, they’re developers!
As I can see (and I am using WP since 2006), there are three reasons why one would create a WordPress theme and would like to distribute it:
- You created theme for yourself or out of curiosity, you want to give something back to community, so you give it for free to everyone.
- You created a theme for with a specific purpose in mind; maybe to gain authority, maybe for get a better exposure for your business or yourself. You create a free theme that will hopefully become very popular and gain lots of traction. If it does, you call it a success.
- You create a WP theme that you want to sell — aka premium theme.
Now let’s take a look how the quote above reflects with each of these cases.
If you’ve built a theme for the first purpose, you don’t care if that product is perfect or not when you release it. As long as it does the job for you, it’s OK. If someone gives you a bad rating for the item you don’t give a fuck, as it has no impact to you (maybe emotional, but not financial). You gave something for free and never promised anything about it, so if people have some troubles with this theme (or require more your time, for example for development or support) it is irrelevant. Most probably you are not a WP business owner in this case. But you also don’t financially rely on this product, so no matter how buggy it is, that’s OK.
If you’ve built a theme for the second purpose, the things are different. It is your goal that the product is great, more polished than other free themes, it works great and it gets great reviews and ratings. You should invest time in testing the theme, making sure it works, provide compatibility. Heck, maybe even provide support for free. All of this will influence how popular your theme will become. But nevertheless, what did I say about the reason?
[…] maybe to gain authority, maybe for get a better exposure for your business or yourself […]
If you’ve built a theme for the second purpose, you are a business man/woman. By definition.
If you’ve built a theme for the third purpose, it’s even more straightforward. If you sell a product, you are a business man/woman. I am not sure if there is any better definition than that.
To conclude: most of the people creating WP themes are doing this for business and you should embrace that fact. Maybe you’re selling for money, maybe you’re marketing yourself. But you’re in business.
Last note: I absolutely agree with Emil that themes should be shipped as tested and as bug-free as possible. No matter what was your reason for building the theme (even if it is the first). But don’t fall into infinite loop where you will be “snoozing” your release date just because you don’t feel it is the time. It is the time.
Go ahead and ship it!
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