Anatomy of a revenue-generating, self-sustaining website (Built in under 30 hours!)

A quick and dirty story of divThemes: A minimalist Theme Search Engine. 
From ideation to execution. 

Ideation

All products - good or bad starts here. An idea.

For this particular story, we're focusing on divThemes.com. It was a domain I registered back in 2009, and sold premium WordPress themes on for over a year. I had stopped the theme sales when I got busy with work, and felt I could not provide support. After 2010, it's been lying dormant for over 7 years now.

What could be done on divThemes? It has to be something related to "themes". But so many different theme sites out there already. What more can bring to the table?

How about a Theme Search Engine that searches across all those theme sites? That would help a user to explore and compare themes easily, from one single place.

Features

Always KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Filters to find the themes, and a grid view to display the results. And a neat UI. This should do.

Sample Search: Minimal + Portfolio Wordpress Themes, that's within my budget of 39-59$

Interface: Design and development

Front-end design usually takes up 75% of my development time for any project. It turns out to be too expensive.

But not this time. This project uses flexie.css (I will be uploading flexie to github next week). Flexie is an amazing CSS framework that packs all the essentials, and lets you build webapp designs amazingly fast. Like really really fast development. The 20 sec. video below demonstrates some of its prowess.

How helpful was flexie? CSS styles of such a project would have easily crossed over a 1000 lines of code. divThemes' custom CSS stands at less than 80! That's over 90% reduction in code and hence development time! With no compromise on the visual design.

Tech Stack/Backend Development

It's easy to think a "WordPress blog" would be good enough for such a project. No. Would you keep adding one theme entry as a blog post manually? Everyday? For how long?

My choice for backend has been PHP7/Laravel for a long time now. It's just too amazing. It's highly extensible, super-fast and is not resource-hungry. And for front-end intelligence, you should be using a variant of Angular, React or Vue.js. I have used AngularJS as it's a very simple project.

To summarize, the design & code was completed in under 30 hours over a weekend.

Traffic generation

Approach taken for organic traffic for any new project is the same:

1. Add website to Google via Search Console. Keep an eye on crawl
2. Partner with 1-2 websites in a similar space for back-links.
3. Optimize the title, keywords, and desc META tags. [Tip] The most important part is to optimize the page title generation, keeping in mind what a search engine user would be searching for

Wait for 4-5 days, and if you did things right (good content, optimized titles...), you will start to see organic traffic hitting your website.

Monetization

One you have the visitors coming in, the next logical step would be to make money off your website.

Affiliate sales can easily surpass revenue from contextual/display ads. I decided to skip contextual ads and purely go with relevant affiliate programs.

Premium Wordpress Themes and Wordpress Hosting would be my best bet for a Theme Search Engine.

For divThemes, text/banner ads have been used for 'Hosting' affiliates. And for 'Premium Themes' affiliates, the code auto-appends referral IDs to all matching outgoing links.

It's not much, but it's a start for a nascent website.

Automation

Newsflash! Nobody (humans and bots alike) wants to see the same content over and over again. How do we keep the site updated?

Automate it, of course. On divThemes:

1. A crawler runs once everyday and checks for the latest themes from multiple sites (PHP7 script, coupled with DOM parser to extract relevant data) and saves it as an organized JSON locally.
2. Another scheduled CRON job parses the JSON and smartly adds to/updates the database in batches.

Done! We now have a self-sustaining, revenue-generating site with a decent-enough organic traffic. All this in under 30 hours of work.

Check out the final product @ divthemes.com

Footnote: 
I've been making neat webapps like these (and bigger ones) since 2007. 
Reach out to me on shout@think.dj, and I'll be glad to mentor/help you out.