An Early Look At Themedemo.co

Filed Under

Published

March 12, 2013

8 Comments

The fine folks at Themedemo.co were nice enough to give us an early look at their new product, which as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, allows you to do a rather full demo of a theme before you purchase it.

This isn’t just a visual demo where you get screen shots of what it looks like – Themedemo.co actually creates a temporary blog where you have access to the WordPress backend and the full capabilities of whichever theme you chose to demo.

Check out our walk through:

Fullscreen_3_11_13_6_49_PM — We got a sneak peek!

So if your theme supports different post formats, has customizable options, different templates or you want to see what different widgets will look like, you can! It’s definitely a great way to vet a new theme before you purchase.

What’s nice for the theme creator is the demo is only temporary and no edit or view access to PHP files is allowed. The demo disappears after a set number of hours and the customer is then given the opportunity to purchase your theme and leave a review.

I’ve got to say this idea is pretty cool. Being able to mess with sidebars, widgets, menus, post formats, etc is really nice. You want to know what your content is going to look like before you purchase right?

Our early look granted us access to one demo, check out the screen shots below to see themedemo.co in action:

The classic WordPress backend ready for your input.

The Buttercream theme we were able to review.

Want to know what these are going to look like?

Create new posts, publish, and then view them.

Add widgets and menus then check out what it looks like.

You can even access the customization options for your theme.

This theme is definitely not my cup of tea, but it was definitely an enjoyable experience to put it through it’s paces. I’m also not aware of what themes they currently have available to demo. Like I said, we were only given access to this one theme.

I am writing this review from a writer’s perspective: I want to see exactly what my publication options are and how my content is going to look once it is published. Themedemo.co gives me this information first hand which then allows me to make an educated decision about what theme to purchase.

I would love to know what you developers and designers think of this.

Would you use a demo system like this for your work? Learn more over at their homepage.

There are 8 comments

March 12, 2013 #

James McBride

This is a great idea, it’d be fantastic to have the option to either upload your database or see a version of the theme fully operational, perhaps running Lorem Ipsum with some creative commons images.
March 12, 2013 #

Zulfikar Nore

Totally love the idea – would save me a lots of time in having to set up demos for every theme I release.

The facility to get feedback is a gem, we developers can only improve our products based on feedback and catering to what the end user wants as opposed to us bundling a bunch of functions and options from our own ideas.

Can’t wait to give this a test and thanks for the share.
March 12, 2013 #

Adam Pickering

I’ve been chatting with Michiel Sikkes over at Themedemo.co and he told me the plan its to allow authors to setup there demo on there server, import the XML dummy content, if theres plugins needed add those and setup any theme options.

Once the author has finished setting up the theme they’ll take a “Snap Shot” of the theme demo and when a new user/customer requests to test out your theme demo it will be setup just like the version the theme author has done.

This would be great as people won’t be complaining that the theme doesn’t look anything like the product demo and would lead hopefully to more sales conversions.
- March 12, 2013 #
  
  John Saddington
  
  sales conversions are the key. love to see that happen and tracked, if possible.
  - March 12, 2013 #
    
    Adam Pickering
    
    Best way to track if sales are coming from Themedemo.co would be to add a custom affiliate link in the email that gets sent out to the customer, and a link in the backend to purchase the theme.
March 13, 2013 #

Chris Robinson

Definitely an interesting idea, anyone know what the pricing structure is going to be like?
- March 19, 2013 #
  
  Michiel Sikkes
  
  We will probably be charging on a basis of how many demo environments you can run simultaneously. Kind a like how many potential sales you can make at any given moment in time.
  
  That said, we’re going to figure out the correct balance between features and packages. We’ll announce this in the future.
March 19, 2013 #

Michiel Sikkes

Hey guys,

Thought I’d chip in and reply to some comments.

In our current beta you can configure the demo environment by uploading XML demo content and install WordPress.org plugins that will be automatically installed for each new demo environment.

In a later stage we will be adding something that we call “snapshotting” so you can prepare your Demo by actually going into a “template” demo environment and make a snapshot so it will be used for every new demo that people sign up for. This way you can set more advanced options or upload images that you can normally not upload with the XML importer.

When this all works fine we’re going to move into conversion tracking and gathering feedback for your themes so you can actually measure which demos increased your conversions and hook it up to your own sales process.

We’re just starting out and we have a bright future ahead 🙂 If you’d like to get a chance for the early beta please sign up at the site or email [email protected] and we’ll get you started as quickly as possible!

Michiel

How do you stay on top of your WordPress game?