It's always exciting to launch something. Whether it's a blog post or a redesign, the moment you release into the wild the culmination of hours upon hours worth of work is quite a high.

So imagine releasing a project you've spent months executing, and even longer thinking about. It feels pretty good. Of course what I'm talking about is Artisan Themes, the self-described place for "hand-crafted blog themes." ¹

At this point if Artisan Themes didn't make a single dollar then I wouldn't even care. (Well, okay, that's not entirely true.) I'm just so happy to finally have the project live.

The Process

Building Artisan Themes was a great teaching tool and like the outcome of most large processes I picked up some new skills and gained a few notches on the experience belt.

I learned a lot about focusing on your product and to not let what others are doing drive your decisions and goals. To help reinforce that idea, I made a quick iPhone/iPod touch background one day based on a quote from 37signals during one of their 37signals Live programs. Feel free to download it for your own use.

The Products

Both the flagship theme (Renaissance) and the site itself changed quite a bit as the project progressed.

Renaissance was originally based on my old design for this site when it was still at thedesigncanopy.com. I had stripped out all the personal touches and added more features to create the base theme. At that point I had more or less finalized it and was planning to move forward with selling it.

However, I felt it was a bit lacking so I started reworking it and basically rebuilt everything to the state that is now. Overall a much better final product.

The plan for the parent site varied much more. At first I had just planned to sell the theme from a page on this site; then it morphed into selling it from a totally separate site. The first name I had for this new site/idea I believe was Blog Jump-Start; which of course is the epitome of lame.

The next idea was Keen Themes. Yes, that's right, I even bought the domain name for this one. I have a tendency to rush into things and this was no exception. I never felt confident about it but I decided to just go with it. It took a very loving wife telling me that it sounded "icky" to finally convince me to search for another name.

Artisan Themes was a name I had thought of after purchasing keenthemes.com so I decided to go with that one. Then I discovered the typeface Stern Pro (thanks, I Love Typography), thought more about what kind of product I wanted to communicate, and things really started coming together.

Below is a series of what I call 'idea mockups' that show the progression of the design for the main Artisan Themes' page.

Figure 1The first idea mockup. As you can see about the only thing that stuck around was the purchase button.I also felt a dire need to have a big, beautiful ampersand. The one shown in the mockup is from the typeface Arno Pro.

Figure 2Here you see the brilliant naming idea of Blog Jump-Start.

Figure 3Now in 3D!

Figure 4And back to 2D.

Figure 5And back to 3D! I really like the yellow bar in this design, I think it does a great job of calling out the price and the main action for the site. I'm still a big fan of this overall layout.

Figure 6You can see the final ideas and layout more or less coalescing in this mockup. The home page changes and hover effects would come more towards the end.

Powered by…

Or Colophon if you will

The entire Artisan Themes site is built with aMember Pro for the user and product management, Vanilla for the support forum, and three different WordPress installations (if you include the install for the theme demo) to manage the content and the blog.

aMemberaMember has an ugly back end, but overall I'm very happy with its powerful user and product management functionality.

VanillaI would have preferred to use bbPress for the forum, but there wasn't an integration module that coincided with aMember, so I went with Vanilla. What the module does is tie the user database for aMember with the user database for whatever third party you choose. So whenever a user is created in aMember (by purchasing a product, or membership) the same user name and password is created for the Vanilla forum.

Vanilla is not a bad product, it was pretty easy to skin and it ships with a tableless layout by default. The only complaint I have is the quality of third-party plugins, out of the six or seven I tried only two worked completely without serious errors. But I don't really have any room to complain because I'm not doing anything to make it better!

Moving Forward

Artisan Themes was the "big" idea; and now that it's complete the little ideas are starting to flow. The future involves choosing which ones to follow and build.