First Look at Thrive Themes and More
Here are today’s links:
- Thrive Themes on Twitter
- Thrive Themes on Facebook
- Thrive Themes on Google+
- Sign up for the business building webinar with Danny Iny.
Please leave a comment below.Note that I don’t reply to all comments, but I do read them all.
If I don’t reply to your comment, it most likely means that I agree with what you say and don’t have anything meaningful to add, myself. I appreciate and read all comments and your comments play an important part in what I write about, so keep them coming.
Spammy comments are always filtered or removed. No surprise there.
Great update. I’m very much looking forward to these themes. Thesis seems to do a great job with typography. I hope you don’t miss this very important part: typography options and implementation.
Typography is very important to me as well. We have a wide range of options for the fonts in our themes and the default sets are always well chosen.
Shane
Looks totally awesome. I could use those themes you showed right now. Need a beta tester, lol?
Goals for 2014? Well, they are under wraps a bit but I am rolling out a new style of funnel in the next days that will be part of a larger project later. I have at least one WSO product ready to go so that will be coming soon and I hope to be creating many more and beating last year’s tally of 3 JVZoo products of the day. I also have some personal learning and achievement goals concerned with traffic & evergreen offers…but that is secret, lol.
Enough about my s**t…Amazing work, mate. Keep me in the loop, man.
Barry
Thanks, Barry!
It’s a bit too early with these themes, even for beta testing. We’re currently building some new features (into all the themes, even the finished ones), so there are parts that are very much work in progress, right now.
Sounds like you had a really good 2013. I wish you all the best with beating your personal record this year. :)
Shane, will you use Thrive for imimpact?
Re 2014 goals… for me it’s all about relaunching my blog, getting the brand right and building a product.
Yep.
-Joe
Im with Joe on this one Shane,
2014 will be about re-branding and relaunching my website.
I must admit that i was thoroughly disappointed with Optimizepress 2.
its slow,clunky full of bugs.
just hope thrive does better
I hope so too, although we’re not a direct competitor to OP2 (at least not initially).
Hi Joe,
I already do. The theme you’re looking at here is FocusBlog – a.k.a. Thrive Theme Number 1. :)
Great to see themes be developed by someone who actually has worked and is working with WP themes and knows what is needed to improve the possibilities. A bit sorry to hear Thrive themes will only produce landingpage oriented themes. I would prefer a much wider usable theme, with a landing page as one of the features. My experience is people often first need to get to know you, trust you and if you then offer a product, they will buy much quicker. The way to build trust is to offer valuable content through for example a stunning magazine theme, combined with Hybrid Connect. If a powerful landing page would then be an available option in the magazine theme, when the time is right, I could then point them to this.
My goal for this year: increase traffic on my websites, increase subscriptions to my newsletter, increase sales through the newsletters.
The themes aren’t built only for marketing pages. Having a beautiful blogging component is very important for all our themes as well. We even have some purely blogging focused themes in the pipeline. But the key is: even with a blogging theme, we look at conversion goals. What’s the purpose of the blog? What conversion goal do you want readers to achieve? And then we build in features that make these goals easier to achieve.
Are the Thrive Themes mobile ready like Optimize Press 2.0?
Yes, absolutely. In fact, I’d say more so than OP2, since our themes are much lighter and faster.
That’s great, please add me to any beta testing too ;-)
Shane,
I have themes coming out of my ears. But one thing I don’t see is a collection of themes for membership sites and online courses. Thrive Visual Editor is actually providing part of that solution, but it would be great to have themes built for video + resources geared toward online education.
2014 is going to be the year I launch my first online courses and membership site!
That’s an interesting point. We don’t currently have any themes made for this kind of thing yet, but now that you mention it, I think we should have. :)
Since I use memberships for my products as well, this definitely makes sense to me.
I’m also in the process of building a membership site for online courses – and I am using Wishlist for this (and yes perhaps I should have gone with Digital Access Pass),but that’s another story.
My question is can I integrate my Wishlist site into one or more of your Thrive Themes?
I want to build a whole series of landing pages to drive traffic to the public hub of the new site (for those wanting to get to know & trust) and from there to landing conversion pages for the online or offline course products, which then take the purchaser into the membership section of the site.
Hi Michael,
Do you know if Wishlist is capable of protecting custom post types, out of the box? I expect it would be.
Based on some feedback I got, we’re going to add a feature that is specifically made for styling member pages and deliver online lessons. We’ll do what we can to make this feature compatible with as many membership solutions and plugins as possible, as well.
Sounds good. Although I like my current theme.
Too bad you didn’t make a plugin option. :(
If you prefer the plugin option then try the Thrive Content Builder, you’ll still get good pages.
Well, we do have the content builder plugin. :)
And we’ll be developing some interesting new features for that, as well.
Looking forward to these themes. Currently we try to fit most clients into a StudioPress theme for business and stability reasons but they are far from perfect. Many child themes have small annoying bugs. The problem with their framework/child system is that they update the framework as you would expect but very rarely the child themes so the bugs just stay their. They should also be updating the child themes as bugs are found by users.
My goals for 2014 is to develop the parts of my company that builds assets for itself. For example we are a Google Partner and manage many small business PPC accounts for them. This is fine and we will continue to do it but I would also like to begin building some of my own local websites, drive traffic to them and then offer to lease that property to the appropriate business.
I can see clients (say a plumber) still having their own website and marketing program but also leasing a lead generating site from us to add even more diversity to their program.
Also we will be going back into SEO quite aggressively. We have backed out of it in 2012-2013 in favour of paid advertising but now that so many SEO companies have closed their doors or changed their offering to a “me too PPC solution” we feel their is a great opportunity.
I have 2 websites to develop within a week. Will Thrive be ready? We are about to use a StudioPress theme but would love to try one of your themes for this client.
BTW I think focusing on themes that are designed to sell products or services is brilliant. It fills a MASSIVE hole in the market. I check ThemeForest all the time for Landing Page themes that I could re-purpose as websites but they are way off the mark. I don’t see how this service van fail.
Unlike a previous commenter I would urge you NOT to become another “me too” theme service that is more about blogging than selling. That’s what everybody else is doing.
That’s a very interesting point about SEO. I can imagine that there are new opportunities opening up, now that so many people have left the field.
I know exactly what you mean about Themeforest and Co. by the way. Any theme I get, I tend to have to customize for hours before it’s suitable for my kind of website.
Love the look of the second one, and parallax (I’m told that’s what landing page themes are officially called) look really good. I’m on the Genesis framework, and it will take a lot to make me move as I use the short codes and buttons in the theme. To move from that will leave me a huge amount of pages and posts to correct. I do like it though, and I’ll probably buy it even though I’ve nowhere to use it!
Hi Sarah,
You raise an interesting point about moving from one theme to another. I’ve just had an idea about how we might be able to make that a lot easier for people… :)
Will the themes include a members area/plugin?
No. For now, we are focusing on core WordPress features and making them as good as possible. Some type of membership system might follow at some point in the future, but we have no specific plans for it.
Hi Shane
I enjoy your updates and products and look forward to the thrive themes set.
I missed out on the live editor as I was away at the time, so ended up going for optimizepress2 on your review recommendation.
My obvious question is it a “me to” with OP@ and lead pages or quick unique with user friendly elements.
I managed to sort of build a home page with op2 but not the easiest of things to do really. so question is thrive going to enable users to build an acceptable looking home page?
Kind Regards
Jeff
Our themes are not an OP2 competitor. They are, first and foremost, “regular” WordPress themes built for many purposes. It’s just that they are also suitable for creating sales pages. We may go more in a direction like OP2 eventually, depending on customer feedback.
One of my major problems has been that I have no idea what a realistic goal looks like.
Running Amazopia and the associated FBA business has taken my wife and me to a place where we have enough income to get by fairly comfortably, but it is a far cry from being passive. It’s close to being geographically independent, but that’s not quite enough.
So a goal for the FBA business this year is to build it $300,000 in profit. At that point, I think we can find someone to sell it to, which will be a fairly complex sale because the important parts of the business are the experience and process needed to run it well, which means a two or three month apprenticeship with the buyer for knowledge transfer.
In parallel with that, I am teaching myself affiliate marketing, and working on some information products in 3 chosen niches (I may put one on the back burner; which one depends on where the money comes from). But as I mentioned, I don’t know what a realistic goal would be for any of that. I think that right now, I will concentrate on seeing what I can accomplish over the next 90 days, and from that, if I think I have enough information and experience to set a goal, I’ll do that.
Good to know that the FBA business is doing so well. If you’re aiming to sell, I think it will be essential to take yourself out of the business first and have everything outsourced, along with very clear instructions about every part of the process, so that the people doing the work can be replaced and new people can quickly learn what needs to be done. This will make the business massively more sellable.
Well, Shane, I agree that would make the business more sellable. But almost *all* of the value of that business at its current level is in the effort that my wife and I put into it, including the day-to-day decisions of what to buy, based on what we have learned.
I would have no idea how to outsource the process of “scouting” or “sourcing” without essentially giving the business away. As I mentioned in our discussion a few months back, I have personally witnessed a case where an employee figured out how the business worked, and basically became a new competitor, with the advantage of starting with a good list of sources.
Maybe a better approach would not be actually selling the business, but doing one-on-one coaching to people wanting to get into it. While phasing myself into something more passive.
This is what engineers call a Hard Problem.
That does indeed seem like a tricky problem.
Great looking theme Shane, It’s really good to see someone offering something a little different in the theme marketplace.
My goal for 2014 is to finally launch my tutorials website, I have been building it for far too long, now it the time to unveil it to the public. I’m also going to stop stretching myself into so many different projects and concentrate on just a few key ones.
Thanks, Lee!
Not stretching yourself too think is a very good goal, in my experience. I had the same issue of trying to do too many things at the same time and it really didn’t do me any good at all.
Hey Shane & Paul
They look like great examples. A couple of quick things from a past and, obviuosly, future customer:
1. Will there be developer rights available to Thrive themes?
2. As mentioned, a membership theme (one with templates for delivering educational content and product download specifically) would be killer. If you need ideas just shoot me an email.
Since OP1 was shut down (to new clients hence I’m unable to use it for clients) and that OP2 doesn’t match it in the membership side of things I think there is a massive gap in the market.
Anyway, good luck with the launch,
Dave
Thanks, Dave!
Was great having a chat with you about this and I’m very excited about adding a few new features to our themes. :)
Been using Thrive on WordPress for awhile now. Loving the ease and professional tools it offers
Excited about these new products!
Thanks, Quinton! We’re excited to finally be close to launching them as well. :)
Hi Shane
Will any of your themes be suitable for review sites based on physical products such as Amazon etc.
If so, what would be the advantages of your themes as opposed to what is available now.
We don’t have any review themes planned yet, but it might be something we’ll do sometime in the future.
As for advantages: one of the major advantages is that all our themes are built to be light and fast. Loading speed is the first conversion factor in line, so with all other things being equal, the faster site will make more money.
Awesome video Shane,
The Themes look great from what I was able to see….. can’t wait and I signed up to be notified.
As for my 2014 goals… they’re very similar to yours in that I need to build my TEAM so that I can grow beyond the limited capabilities that one guy (me) can effectively handle. I’ve tripled my business this year, and am in real need of a tech partner (PSD to WP) and content copywriters. I still like to engage with my clients directly and discuss strategy and business goals, branding + design.
Hope this will be our year!
ciao
Rob
(Amsterdam)
Hey Rob, sounds like you have an interesting year ahead!
I wish you all the best with these goals.
Will you record the webinar? I am not able to be in it the 28th…
Thanks,
Tom
It’s up do Danny whether there will be a replay or not. I’ll ask him to do one, though.
Hi Shane,
I am pretty excited by your theme membership. Any expected launch date?
Hello Trishan,
Launch date will be in the first or second week of Feb. A definitive launch date will be announced before the end of the week.
As someone with an existing WP theme on my main site, will changing it over to the new Themes cause any problems? Can anyone do it or does it need a tech person?
Thanks – really looking forward to it.
That depends on how many theme-specific features you are using. For all your regular WordPress content, your posts, your pages etc. changing from one theme to another is a matter of clicking a button. However, if you are using short codes, page templates, widgets and other features that are specific to your theme, those will not carry over when you switch themes and you’ll have to edit the pages where those are used. On a large site, that can be a bit of a pain, admittedly.
With Thrive Themes, we’re setting it up so that you can always switch between any of our themes without a hitch and without having to do any extra work.
Looking forward to the release of your new themes. I am hoping they are full featured, and we don’t have to use many plugins and witgets to make it perform. Woocommerce ready?
We’re not building any Ecommerce themes at the moment. Depending on demand, we may create some in the future.
Concerning full featured: it’s very important to me to have a very solid base feature set. But at the same time, I want to keep the themes as lean and fast as possible, so we’re not piling in a thousand features like you see in some themes.
To me, creating a good theme is like building a race car. In some cases you add high-tech stuff to make it better. But in many cases, it’s a question of cutting away everything that isn’t necessary for building a performance-focused machine. It’s a balance between adding and reducing that makes a great race car as well as a great theme.