You may recall that a few months ago I released a little side project named “Consumer Whore”. CW is a shopping blog that features one cool item to buy every day. The difference from most shopping blogs is that while most other sites in the genre feature items that are four figures or are not available to buy yet, I only feature items that can be purchased right now. And for cheap.
It’s been dead for a few weeks as I traveled Europe, but it’s time to awaken the beast. I missed browsing around my RSS feeds and discover tons of great stuff, and I couldn’t wait to start again.
So when I wasn’t sending off resumes and cover letters this week, I have been tinkering with CW and it’s new custom Wordpress theme.
So what’s different?
Money
Well, for starters, this will be my second site ever that I have attempted to monetize (the first being College v2). I plan on doing this with the usual mix of Text Link Ads and Google Adsense. However, the real strategy I’m testing on this site is the use of affiliate links. Usually, after finding an item I’d like to feature, I check if the retailer has an affiliate program. If it doesn’t, no big deal. But if it does, I link to the item using the affiliate link.
I’m willing to bet that if a blogger builds trust, the reader could care less if the blogger is making money. In fact, as long as the content is not dictated by the advertising, they may prefer it that way. A fine line I know, but it’s a theory I’m excited to test and one that I will certainly document on this blog.
Design
The design has received a complete makeover. I’m trying to take Barack Obama’s advice and stick to this style of design for CW for the years to come. The goal was to make browsing items easy, and even fun. I also wanted the item of the day to jump out when you first load the front page.
This design was also my first time using multiple loops on a Wordpress theme (one for the item of the day, one for the tabs). The tabs were done using the tabber script, and the banner is from this Smashing Magazine post. Also, many thanks to wordpress forum user mores for his custom php thumbnail function.
I’m certainly open to any criticism out there. I’ve been debating whether there are too many thumbnails, or if the tabs are too big, so any input in that regard will be rewarded with candy and general good will. In fact, if you told me one thing that sucked about it, you’d be doing me a huge favor.
So go poke around and if you really like it, subscribe.