Coming Soon: Dark Matter Pro for Pixelpost. How much should it cost?
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Tagged with: It's been a bit quiet on this weblog for a while. The reason behind this is that I spend most of my free time on Dark Matter Pro, the premium version of my critically acclaimed pixelpost theme. Dark Matter is getting quite popular among photobloggers since it's been released and I figured I could take a shot at trying to monetize some of it's succes. To be honest, my first attempt failed miserably so far. While I expected to sell at least a handful of copies, nothing has happened yet, despite it's own neat little microsite and my first AdWords campaign running at Google.
Since donations haven't been working very well either I decided to try to work on a premium version of the theme which will be available for purchase at a low price for non-commercial use and the existing $99 price for commercial use.
The currently available version will remain free forever. I do however hope that a lot of users will find it worthwhile to upgrade their Pixelpost photoblog to Dark Matter Pro. At this moment I'm nearly done with the following features:
Dark Matter Pro Features
- AJAX commenting
- Configurable collapsible comments
- Configurable option to disable comments completely
- Adjustable page width (choose from 700, 750, 800, 850, 900 and 950 px widths)
- Ready made customisation support for various popular 3rd party add-ons
As I'm still knee deep in the development process I may come up with some more features.
How much to charge?
Now my question to you is: How much should this cost?
While I never expected to get rich from a premium template I expected to at least be able to fly my fiancee back to London on this. So far I have failed. I guess I suck at monetising any of my pet projects ;)
To wrap this up: Do you think it's worth shelling out a bit of cash for? And if yes: What would be a reasonable price?
Comments are more than welcome!
Finally: Check it out!
I'm using my own photoblog as a guinea pig site for Dark Matter Pro. Whenever you visit it, you can see the latest state of the template running live. Check it out!
At 30 June '08 - 23:51 Camiel wrote:
I would really like a PRO version for my non commercial site and I would definitely pay for it. How much, don’t know yet. Maybe 39 euro’s?
I would like to see some features added though, for instance
1.) A view counter, daily, monthly and yearly basis
2.) Display pictures posted on the same day, one month and one year ago
3.) Ability to open a google/yahoo map which shows the picture taken on the map by using the gps data stored in the .jpg => For instance: http://www.pixelpost.org/extend/addons/e..
I’ve tried to implement option 3 in my current Dark Matter installation but that doesn’t work yet. I think it has to do with litebox javascript not being compatible with the yahoo api’s.
At 01 July '08 - 00:53 Marco wrote:
Thanks for the feedback!
As for your feature requests:
I think those should all be done by a separate add-on in my opinion as they’re not really things that should be part of a template.
As for your option 3: That seems like a good candidate for a plugin to make suitable for use with DM Pro out of the box. I will look into it!
At 01 July '08 - 01:06 Camiel wrote:
I agree with you on 1/2, there are add-ons available for that. I’m excited about the option 3 development. That would be really great as geotagging photo’s is becoming more and more popular.
At 01 July '08 - 17:19 Domc wrote:
At 02 July '08 - 08:06 David Robinson wrote:
At 19 January '11 - 17:18 xenki wrote: