Announcing: freeprofilelooks.com
When I signed up for Virb.com, I was amazed by the amount of customization available for user profiles. The area between the Virb header-bar and the Virb footer is just a like a big canvas where you can do anything that is possible with HTML and CSS. After making my own simple design for my profile, I realized that customizing Virb profiles is actually fun. Sure, I always find CSS fun, but I'm sure that I am not the only one who feels this way!
So I had an idea: there are tons of sites out there that offer free designs for MySpace profiles, and 99.9% of those designs are hideous. With the amount of customization available at Virb, it would not be hard at all to put together free themes for Virb, and a good site offering those themes would be helpful to all the users on Virb who aren't web designers. Well, it took quite a bit of work putting together my first theme and throwing together all the necessary site setup and Wordpress programming to get it all ready, but as of yesterday my new site is a go: Free Profile Looks.
You might recognize the site design; I can explain. I needed a Wordpress theme that would facilitate posting long code snippets, but I couldn't find a single one. Most of the themes I looked at don't even consider the possibility that someone may want to post code on their blog. So I had to dig up some old template files, and the previous theme I was running here (which was called Montoya in the Clouds, btw) was the best one to use. It was really easy to cut down the various page files and the CSS in order to make a quick-n-dirty theme for Free Profile Looks, and I will probably base any future design for the site off that theme.
I also have to give a shoutout to the plugins that made it possible for me to everything I needed to do with Free Profile Looks: Flexible Upload, which allows me to control the Wordpress upload tool, Preserve Code Formatting, which combined with a bit of hackery, actually allows me to post whitespace-preserved code snippets inside of textareas, Slightbox, which is Lightbox 2.0 based on Mootools, and Ultimate Tag Warrior, which allows me to use tags to organize the themes.
So I have my first free design up at Free Profile Looks, which happens to be a port of the "Bus Full of Hippies" theme. Look how nicely it fits on Virb:
Pretty good eh? Go sign up for Virb and put it on your profile then!
Okay, in all seriousness, the important thing to do now is get the word out about my new site. I'll be developing another theme in a few days and I would like to get some visitors already. So be sure to tell all your friends, and take a moment to Digg the site. If all 600 of you readers were to do that, well, then I would know that you all truly do love me. You do love me, right? Right?
That theme is beautiful - and definitely not something that could be accomplished on MySpace. Great job.
Would you consider allowing other designers to offer designs through freeprofilelooks?
It's something I've thought about. My thinking is that when I get into putting ads on the site (not many, but enough that I'll be making more what the site costs me), then I don't know how I would handle something like revenue sharing… if another designer's theme is driving a lot of traffic to the site, then they probably deserve the revenue. I'm not in a position to handle something like that, but if designers are OK with putting themes on my site in the event that they wouldn't get anything other than notoriety back for it (which come to think of it, is a lot like all those open source design sites), then I would definitely allow it.
Yes it definatly looks neat and much better than the crappy myspace themes but I seriously do not think it will take over from myspace. I have written a bit hear on my blog: Virb is not the myspace killer