Building WPVote Part 2 : Planning

In part 1 of Building WPVote I mentioned how I have recently purchased WPVote from Jean-Baptiste Jeung.

The first thing I did before I even spoke to Jean was trying to think of simple things I could do that would add the greatest value with the least effort. This was a project I wanted to monetize from the start, and I didn’t want to spend months and months developing it.

I intend for the site to be a WordPress resource. A bookmarking and voting site much like Digg. I also wanted it to be easy and free to use. As such, I came up with the following list of things I could add to improve it (note: this is a wish list and not a to-do):

  • Twitter account
  • Ajax voting
  • New design
  • Make voting more prominent
  • Add content categories and tags
  • Blog widgets
  • Content API
  • Facebook connect login and wall posts

Now that I have done some work on the site, this specification has altered considerably, but it was a good starting point and will help guide future development.

In terms of monetizing the site, I saw a few options.

  1. Sell ads with BuySellAds (These are sold on the current site but will probably be removed for the initial launch)
  2. The classic – Adsense
  3. Promote my own WordPress themes
  4. Promote other WordPress related goodies via affiliate schemes
  5. Sell the new WPVote theme on Pro Theme Design

With all this in mind, I was pretty confident that I could get a return on whatever I spent relatively easily while building something cool – so I started talking to Jean.

After some back and forth (and a lot of questions from me), we came to an agreement, and Jean sent me the domain name, theme, and site content so that I could start the build.

The build has now been in progress for about 3 weeks, and I hope to release WPVote in early January. If anyone has any feature suggestions or ideas for a Digg-style site with a WordPress focus, I’d love to hear them.

In the next post, I am going to talk about some of the things I went through to research the site – hopefully, I will get it published before Christmas.

Let me know what you think on Mastodon, or BlueSky (or Twitter X if you must).

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