As you might have guessed from the landing page on dresssed.com, there’s not much to see for now. I’m still validating the idea and some of my assumptions about it. This is the second step for me in my process to validate the idea after talking to a few people and building a fake buy page and driving traffic to it with AdWords like I did for my ebook.
So far the response has been pretty amazing to say the least. Tweets and posts on two Montreal tech news sites: Montreal Tech Watch and NextMontreal are all saying very nice things about it. I also received a few emails and messages from people wanting to be my first customers right away!
Those of you that subscribed to the Dresssed newsletter have noticed that I carefully placed a small survey as the confirmation page. The purpose of the survey was to validate the market and confirm some assumptions I had.
My first surprise was that more people than I expected are already buying themes or considering it (52.1%). Also a little more than half respondent hired a designer (58%). The Interest chart shows that the decisive factor will be the quality of the themes, which is exactly what I expected.
!https://img.skitch.com/20110105-b5fegrxci31hmjp25nuf3xf1y9.jpg!
The survey also helped me decide which template engines my themes will focus on. I wanted to offer the themes in various HTML templating languages (HAML, ERB) but not the stylesheets, so a decision had to be made.
!https://img.skitch.com/20110105-j7u9mhia3ch983x3sd3fskf8x7.jpg!
As I expected HAML & ERB are the clear winners. And SASS for CSS, since plain CSS is not an option and the new SASS syntax is very similar to plain CSS.
I also wondered if I needed to make the themes backward compatible with Rails 2.x. Since the large majority (94%) is using Rails 3.x for their next project I don’t think this is needed.
You can see the full report: here.