ThoughtThought

I noticed that Mahalo had WP Designer in its list of WP blogs. I don’t want to get sidetracked on Mahalo, but it’s an interesting business, whose owner I have previously blogged about at long, boring length: It is a manually written content *per* keyword? Seems like a LOT of update work, once the innitial ‘build’, which is still ongoing, is completed. Most massive SEO technique ever.

I wonder if they saw the story that WP Designer was sold to the highest bidder?

WP Designer was a one-man Wordpress theme design-cum-blog website. And it was great (and maybe it will still be under new owner). WP Designer produced one the most innovative and unheralded themes out there, WP Market. I think this one theme could start a Wordpress-as-development platform avalanche. Hope so, because the open source ecommerce solutions out there right now are not so hot:

• OsCommerce sucks — makes too many assumptions about customer
• ZenCart sucks — come on, I know it’s a fork, but is it really any different than OsCommerce?
• Drupal Ecommerce SUCKS — just pathetic. I was hoping it would shape up, but no such luck.
• Drupal Uber Cart probably sucks (just because it’s Drupal) — better than ecommerce, but so what
• Magento actually look pretty decent, but there again it makes too many assumptions about the customer
• Joomla itself is a such a tangled mess, I refuse to invest any time looking at its ecommerce solutions

So, when a tool like WP Market comes along, and looks as good as it looks, one sees a glimmer of hope. Mind you, it does hardly anything … yet — more just inspiration for you can do.

And that’s really what WP Designer has been about. Innovating and inspiring Wordpress-related products and ideas.

And now it’s been purchased by an online entrepeuner for $66,000 — what a steal, for a site with these numbers (65,000 absolute unique visitors and over 300,000 pageviews per month).

Congrats Pawel.