Then, there was the issue of hosting. We had decided not to host themes on site, based on advice from both Kevin and Carbon, who both made it very clear that the resulting bandwidth would not be even remotely affordable for a non profit site. But even so, a website dedicated to themes would undoubtedly contain many images, and could still eat up a lot of bandwidth. Looking for a solution, I sent an email off to the head administrator at a site that seemed friendly to hosting Macintosh related sites. This was AmbitiousLemon.com, which now hosts the FunMac forums and several themer’s websites. I received no response, and moved on. (At the time, I did not know that the site had already agreed to host competitor XThemes, and that this may have been a factor in their lack of a response.) But this minor issue turned out to be pretty minor after all. That Thanksgiving break, my uncle pointed out 1and1’s 3 years for free hosting plan, and I signed up. Though they provided limited bandwidth, I decided to host all images at my family’s site, MathGameHouse.com, which incidentally was already paid for by my dad and had nearly unlimited bandwidth. Problem solved.

With a host and a domain address, I began to look for an engine that would be able to display news articles, reviews, and interviews. Previously, all my websites had been created page by page, coded by hand. But MacThemes.net would probably involve hundreds of pages over the course of a year, and it was very clear from the start that a content management system was required. For engine candidates, I first tried asking my friend, a budding programmer and recent Mac convert, to create one. He wisely decided it was too large and ambitious of a first project. Then, I talked about the site with my calculus teacher, Ronald Pacheco. I figured he had the right to know, considering he had been kind enough before to let me download ShapeShifter during his class. As I had found out through the school year, this was an amazing man. Calculus teacher by day, programmer by night, a video game enthusiast, a mountain biker, a pianist, a writer… I could go on. It turned out that he had another trick up his sleeve. He told me about a project he had worked on several years ago called Movable Type. Ron had been one of the first people involved with the budding project, and had contributed code early on. Now, according to him, it had become one of the world’s most popular blogging software. It was flexible, it could do what I needed it to do, and it was free. So I installed Movable Type on my server, and he became my consultant, teaching me how to set it up, and letting me know exactly what it could and could not do.

So far, the project was moving along relatively smoothly, and things were looking pretty positive. But of course, something always goes wrong. While discussing MacThemes with ShapeShifter developer Jason Harris, he mentioned an email he had received from someone else who was starting a theme site. Soon after, I got a chat invitation from Brien Edick, and we began to talk. Apparently, Jason had told him quite a bit about MacThemes, and had encouraged Brien to talk to me about working together. Brien quoted something Jason had said in a previous conversation: “Maybe you guys should get together. I think Phil may actually be making some progress with his theme site. No point in duplicating effort.”

This was a pretty big bump in the road. One of the main reasons I had started this project was because I thought it had a great chance of succeeding, given that there were no competing sites. Now there was. When I told him what I had done so far in preparing and planning MacThemes.net, he asked me if I was interested in merging the sites and teaming up, as Jason had suggested. At that point, it was a hard decision to make, and it didn’t help that neither of us had anything substantial to show. I deflected Brien, asking if we could talk again in a few days, and consulted Adam, Kevin, and Jason. We decided to go ahead with our own, separate effort, and with this slight detour, I went back into MacThemes with the added pressure of a new competitor.

The Design

So with the new revelation of competing site XThemes, activity ramped up. Adam began to send me design ideas for the logo and website. The first thing on the to-do list, of course, was the logo. Options included going with stylized text, or an image with text. Within a day, Adam sent me a mockup of a logo image idea that I loved. Soon after, the final version of the man with the Apple beret was in my inbox, and I proudly showed it to all the people involved. Most everyone loved it, though Kevin was a lukewarm at best: “Ehhhh… tell me that’s not the one Betts did.” Next was the full logo, with text. Adam experimented with several fonts, ranging from the totally modern, to the funky, to more classic fonts, to mixes of them all. We eventually settled what you see today, at the top of the page.

Then, Adam made his first attempt at a site design, basing it off our discussions of the site’s sections, and the decision we had made previously that the design should be relatively neutral (to direct attention to the brighter theme images that the site would feature). He produced design attempt #1, in blue and red:

Kevin hated it, and thought it was bland and uninspired at best. And he complained about the overabundance of negative space. At this point, Adam and I began to wonder whether Kevin had something personal against him. But he went back to the drawing board, and emerged with a totally different design. This time, the design was nearly colorless, but was much bolder, and filled up the negative space that Kevin had griped about. In fact, in retrospect, I think it’s possible to see the beginnings of Adam’s current site in this design. (view)

But again, Kevin rejected it, and pronounced it boring. In Adam’s defense, I mentioned Deskmod and Deviantart as sites that had much worse designs than Adam’s. Kevin replied that though those site designs were gaudy, at least they were interesting. Then, he went on about the lack of interest in this attempt. “I think the thing I hate about it the most is that the white background which everything resides within is totally flat, there is no substance to it, nothing that is attractive and makes you think, I WANT TO TOUCH THAT!! Its hot!! Its just flat boring color.” Then, he quickly mocked up his own quick design in an attempt to inspire Adam Betts. And he suggested I ask Max Rudberg his opinion of the design, which I promptly did, as Max was one of the most popular themers in the community. Max’s verdict? With a bit of prodding, he told me he thought the site did indeed seem a bit boring, and gave some suggestions to improve the design.

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