If you haven’t noticed the last few months, I’ve not posted as much as I used to. The primary reason for this is the fact that I’m rethinking the direction I want to go with this website. When I started this blog, it was just a personal website…nothing more. Then I figured out how to build a WordPress theme, and that knowledge + the little HTML and CSS know-how that I had, I ran with it. I put together a fairly nice variety of free themes. Then I started writing a few tutorials and taking on work for pay. Most of that work has been me fixing things for people(adding logos, sidebars, fixing errors, etc.), and there has been the occasional custom theme.

Moving Away from Free Themes

Honestly, I don’t want to come across the wrong way when I say this, but providing support has worn me down. I get emails everyday for theme support, and I try my best to anwer them all and provide good support. But this has taken my focus off of things that I want to do, and it’s kept me from updating this blog as much as I would like. Let me point out that I really don’t mind answering questions about the themes, and providing fixes if something is working right, but those are only a small percentage of the support questions I get. The far majority are one of the following…

• Something isn’t working, and it’s usually the result of an ad, javascript, plugin, or some other changes that have been made in attempt to modify the design. It just surprises me that folks expect me to fix something that was working before they started making changes.
• I read your tutorial on…..and it doesn’t work for me. This is usually because the instructions were not followed closely.
• How do I……..? No, I don’t want you to do it, just tell me what to do, and I’ll do the work. ~ Honestly, it takes me much longer to explain how to do something, as opposed to doing it myself. So why would I do that, when you could pay me a few bucks to take care of it for you?

Aside from the inbox overload, I’ve had a lot of fun building themes. The various reasons I’ve done so include:

1. To feel like I was giving something back to the WordPress community(afterall, WP is free and awesome).
2. I wanted to learn an enjoyable skill I could use to make money at some point.
3. And originally, I wanted to get links back to this website as quickly as I could.

I would say I’ve accomplished each of those objectives. I think now is the time to tweak my goals and look at other things I’d like to do online. Whatever direction I go, I will still provide support for my themes. As for building free themes, I may provide one occasionally, but not very often. There are plenty of designers who put out free themes and there are thousands of themes available.

Personal blog?

So the next thing on my mind is this: Should I make Antbag.com a personal blog, as it was originally intended to be? You know, one of those blogs where I write about my weekend, home-ownership, car trouble, grilled steaks, guitar playing, and whatever else happens to be going on in my life at the moment? I would enjoy this kind of blog, because it would be all about me And you know people like to talk about themselves. The only problem is, everybody else would get bored quick, because I’m pretty plain and un-exciting. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with personal blogs, I’m just not sure that would be right for Antbag.com. I don’t want to completely change everything I’ve tried to do, and run off the couple of hundred subscribers that I have. As a result of the links pointing back to this site I’ve gotten from the themes, my Technorati rank looks strong, and the front page of this site is now appearing to be a PR6. These things lead me to believe that I should use this platform to try and provide something that would be valuable to someone.

Marketing

One thing I’ve not been very good at is marketing. I think I have a somewhat decent understanding of how to market a website online, it’s just something I’ve never been motivated to do in terms of adwords, learning SEO, social media, etc. One idea I”m considering at this point, is trying to make this website profitable. The changes would probably include advertising, as well as articles related to affiliate marketing, online business ventures, etc.

In the past, I’ve been hesitant about advertising here. From the designer part of my mind, ads just ruin a good design(not that my design is that great, haha), and it’s much harder to get a website to validate when you have ads. I’ve also never thought I had enough traffic to justify advertising. But my interest in building an online stream of income is becoming more prevalent. Not so much from being a web designer or freelancer, but more in building websites, and hopefully profitable ones. More on that later.

Conclusion

So, that’s what’s going on here. If I do decide to include advertising, that will give me a good excuse reason to build a new design for the site. I always enjoy that. Thanks for being a reader of Antbag.com.