I tried, I really did. I spent about 20 hours over two days with my eyes fixed on that godforsaken WordPress theme editor page only to find myself back at square one this morning. I have decided to develop a site about backpacking in Africa on my Wanderstruck domain and have lots of ideas, but little know how. This has meant that I’ve flushed some serious time down the toilet while attempting to bring my ideas to fruition.
If I were just going for a standard blog I would be ok. I can do that. But I would much rather the site act less like a blog and more like a guide, with a blog as a small add-on for when I start my travels on the continent next year. I want to use WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) for the first time, rather than sticking with HTML like I have with all of my other sites. I have everything clearly laid out and know exactly how I want the site to work but it’s all stuck in my head and I don’t have the skills to get what’s in my head onto the web.
That’s where Mike from Blog Theme Machine (soon to be Made by Guerrilla) comes in. He shot me an email last month after finding my blog on some list of making money online blogs. It was pretty much an unsolicited sales pitch offering a redesign of Nerdy Nomad for $500. Normally I would delete this sort of thing but the email was nicely written and I replied that I didn’t want Nerdy Nomad redesigned, thanks anyways and good luck on your projects. He replied ‘no problem, thanks yadda yadda yadda’ and that was that.
Well after my bouts with extreme frustration over the past couple of days, his email popped into my head and I went to his site to check out his work. Good stuff and $500 seems like a fair price so I emailed him to see if he could make WordPress do what I want it to do for Wanderstruck and it turns out he can.
After wasting two full days on nothing (I don’t even feel like I learned anything helpful) I think I’m beginning to see the value in spending a bit of money to free up my time for doing the things I’m good at. It will take Mike a fraction of the time to create a much better site than I would be able to make and, more importantly, it will free me up to work on other things. This is the first time I will be spending any significant amount of money on a website, actually. It’s sort of a big step but I’m really excited to see what Mike can come up with. I will write more posts as the creative process begins to try to give an idea of what is involved in having someone else do work for you.
What do you guys think? Is it silly to spend $500 on a custom theme when I could stumble and bumble my way through and make a semi-decent one myself? Or do you think that freeing up my time to do other things makes spending $500 worth it?
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