Instagram: 261 (+0)
TikTok: 56 (+8)

This week’s numbers

Instagram: 261 (+0)
TikTok: 56 (+8)

Instagram is seeing no growth at all, TikTok is picking up again – double last week’s!

Most popular videos so far

Instagram:

• Creating PowerPoints with AI?

TikTok

• Publish simple static AI created apps via WordPress

Read more at Chris Wharton

A reminder of followers from last week:

Instagram: 261
TikTok: 56

This week’s results

Instagram: 261 (+0)
TikTok: 56 (+8)

Instagram is seeing no growth at all, TikTok is slowing down.

Most popular video so far

Instagram:

• Creating PowerPoints with AI?

TikTok

• Publish simple static AI created apps via WordPress

Insights

TikTok seems to have a lot more views, even with only 64 followers I’m getting several hundred views of my videos.

I have seen a growth of 119,350% in Instagram views though.

One thing I have noticed though is that people don’t respond well to AI poster images, I’ve tried a few now and they’re just not getting reach. So I’m going to try re-posting one of those videos with a different thumbnail to see if I get better traction – as an A/B test.

Read more at Chris Wharton

Please check out the full interview here:

https://www.thevibed.co/article/chris-wharton-ai-cant-do-one-thing-designer-honest-take

and here’s the full interview.

Read more at Chris Wharton

But here’s the thing. I wanted to put together a proper tutorial showing what Cowork can actually do and I figured the best way to do that was to build something real, from scratch, in one shot.

Watch the tutorial

What I built

The example is a side hustle calculator. It’s completely front-end with no database, no server stuff, just a clean dynamic tool that runs entirely in the browser. You can set your hourly rate, monthly expenses, savings goal, annual salary and how many hours a week you can realistically put into a side hustle. It then spits out your projected monthly income, how long it’ll take you to hit your savings target and the bit I think is most useful, a straight comparison between what your side hustle pays per hour versus your day job.

What you can do with this

This is the kind of thing you can build in a single session. It’s not a prototype or a proof of concept. It’s a finished, usable tool that’s already live online. Think lead magnets, onboarding tools, client-facing calculators. Stuff that feels bespoke and valuable because it actually is.

Watch the tutorial

I’ve put the full walkthrough on YouTube above. It covers how to use Cowork, the build process and how to get something like this live. Fair warning: the channel has approximately zero subscribers and the other two videos are me documenting the early stages of building a personal brand, so go in with appropriate expectations.

Check out my other videos on YouTube

Read more at Chris Wharton

A reminder of my follower count from last week:

Instagram: 260
TikTok: 45

This week’s results

Instagram: 261 (+1)
TikTok: 56 (+11)

So Insta is now in “growth” mode again

Interestingly, picking up 11 followers per week on TikTok

Most popular video so far

Instagram:

• Creating PowerPoints with AI?

TikTok

• Publish simple static AI created apps via WordPress

Insights

I was quite surprised to see the interest on TikTok on the post talking about creating static (front end) apps and getting them online. 1,007 views now and going up still.

That’s also got 7 saves. It may be because people are genuinely interested in the KeepStatic WordPress plugin I’ve created or that they just don’t know how to get it online.

Read more at Chris Wharton

It’s now 8th May… 8 days posting every week day across TikTok and Instagram.

A reminder of my follower count:

Instagram: 263
TikTok: 34

and now, drumroll please…. the results are in….

Instagram: 260 (-3)
TikTok: 45 (+11)

So after posting 10 times on Insta and TikTok I’ve got 8 extra followers (3 lost and 11 gained)

What’s happening on Instagram? I’m guessing people either didn’t know they were following me or preferred random photos of my hand-lettered cards over AI. Let’s see how this evens out over time.

Most popular video so far

Instagram:

• Creating PowerPoints with AI?

TikTok

• Should you vibe code an app?

Read more at Chris Wharton

I’ve not started a new Instagram or TikTok – they’ve both been there for a while untouched, so I’m rebooting them.

Follower count

INSTA: 263 followers
TikTok: 34 followers

I’ll check my progress in around a week’s time to see how I’m getting on!

Read more at Chris Wharton

Right, phase two of reshaping the website is underway.

First job done: I’ve turned off the old blog style I had on there and de-forced it back to a normal blog. I’m not a massive fan of the “WordPress til 2025” type theme that comes out of the box, so the plan now is to install a theme called Astra and see where that takes me.

While I was at it I went through all the plugins I had installed and disabled a load of them. I’m down to about six now, which has already made the site noticeably faster. I haven’t done any proper optimisations yet so that’s a nice little win for free.

The two jobs in front of me

There are two main tasks lined up.

The first is making the site look better with a new theme. The second is deleting all the old blog posts that aren’t relevant anymore. I’ll keep a couple of the ones that still pull in decent traffic but the rest need to go.

Before I start mass deleting though, I need to talk about 301 redirects.

Why 301 redirects matter

If you’re not familiar with 301s, they’re search engine friendly redirects. If someone has linked to one of my posts from another site, then I delete that post, anyone clicking the link is going to land on a 404 page not found. That’s not great for the user and it’s not great for Google either.

A 301 permanent redirect tells the search engines that the content has moved and points them to a new version or to whatever the most relevant page is now. So before any deleting happens, I’m mapping out the redirects.

Switching from Beaver Builder to Elementor

My normal go-to page builder is Beaver Builder. It’s solid, it’s quick, I know it inside out. But Elementor gives a bit more style freedom and I haven’t touched it properly in a while, so part of this project is about pushing my own boundaries and getting back up to speed with it.

So Astra Pro is installed, Elementor Pro is installed, and I’m building a brand new homepage from scratch. Nothing groundbreaking. The whole point of this project is that I’m not going to get bogged down in design. Something simple to start with, then iterate.

Trying the AI website builder

Astra has an AI website builder built in which uses ZIP WP under the hood, so I thought I’d have a play with it. Always a slight risk that something like this is going to break the existing site though, so first things first: back up.

Quick reminder if you run a WordPress site yourself: always back up before you mess around. Make sure you back up both the files and the database. Some tools only do one or the other so it pays to check. We have rolling backups on all of our sites which makes life easier, but for one-off changes like this I still kick off a fresh backup first.

With that done I pointed the builder at a SaaS style brief because I wanted something a bit modern, picked a layout that felt close to the Ready Steady Websites look, and let it run.

What ZIP WP actually did

End result: it created a new homepage with a bunch of sections on it. For a minute I thought it had killed my blog, but no, all the posts are still there. Looks like it just replaced what was on the homepage which is exactly what I wanted.

Quick poke around in Elementor to see how the grid was put together. As suspected, it’s not a proper grid. That’s fine for now but worth knowing when I start tweaking.

One handy thing about how I’ve set this up: my holding page is sitting in a static folder on the server. So while I’m fiddling about with WordPress on the back end, visitors still see the holding page out front. That means I can break things on the WordPress side without anyone noticing. Highly recommend that approach if you’re rebuilding a live site.

The fiddly bits

The contact page is empty and a few of the auto-generated blocks are not great. “Digital pioneer” is one phrase I’m going to fix very quickly.

I also had a moment of missing Beaver Builder. In Beaver, if you want to drop from a two column row down to a single column, you just delete the column and it reflows. In Elementor it seems to be a bit more manual. Set the width to 100, drag things around, centre stuff up. Got there in the end but it took longer than it should have.

That’s the kind of friction I expected though. The whole point is to get fluent with this builder again rather than reach for the familiar one every time.

Where I’m leaving it

The homepage is roughly in shape. It’s looking better than it was. The other pages are still a mess but I’ve got a working starting point. Next up I’ll test it on mobile, then come back to the redirects and the old blog clear-out.

Not bad for a phase two session. Join me next time and I’ll pick this up from where I’ve left it. If anything in this is useful for your own site, or you want to chat through how any of it works, give me a shout.

Read more at Chris Wharton

Waking up an 8-year-old email list

Right. First job of the rebuild. I’ve got an old MailChimp account I haven’t properly touched in eight years. Eight. And somehow there are still 110 people on the list who never unsubscribed.

I’m not going to drag those 110 contacts into my new email setup and tank my deliverability on day one. So before I move anything anywhere, I’m running a re-engagement campaign on the old system first. Only the people who actively click through come across to the new one. Everyone else stays where they are, quietly haunting MailChimp.

This is the bit most people get wrong when they switch email platforms. You import a list that hasn’t heard from you in years, your open rates fall off a cliff and your sender reputation goes with it. Do the cull on the old system. Bring only the warm ones across. Future you will thank present you.

The email itself

I kept it short and honest. Subject line: It’s been a while, but I’m back documenting something new.

The body basically says: it’s been eight years, you probably don’t remember subscribing, I don’t blame you if you want out. Back then I was all about WordPress and design. A lot has changed. I’m rebooting the site around AI for web, AI for business, AI for design and working out whether any of it is going to take my job.

If you want to stick around, click the button. If not, no hard feelings.

That’s it. No clever copy, no big pitch. Just a straight ask.

The holding page problem

The button needed somewhere to go. My current site is properly old school (the last post was about selling my WordPress theme business, the comments don’t even work anymore) so I didn’t want to point people at that. I just needed a simple confirmation page while I rebuild the rest of the site properly.

So I jumped into a Claude co-work session and gave it a quick brief. Simple landing page, here’s the title, here’s the copy, here’s a screenshot of my current site so you know what to match. Sonnet handled it fine, no need to reach for Opus on something this simple.

First pass was actually pretty good. I asked it to centre the logo and add an Instagram link with the icon, then uploaded the static file to my server. Done.

And here’s the thing. In an ideal world I’d have spent another hour fiddling with it. Different layout, better type hierarchy, maybe a subtle animation. But that is exactly the trap I’m trying to avoid with this whole series. The point is to build stuff and ship it. Done is better than perfect while I get going.

Refresh, cache cleared, button works, page loads. Move on.

What happens next

The campaign goes out at 7am tomorrow. I’ll watch the click stats roll in over a few days, then move only the people who clicked the button into my new email system. Everyone who ignored it stays in MailChimp where they can keep ignoring me in peace.

Step one done. Step two is sorting out the blog properly. That’s the next post.

If you want to follow along as I rebuild this thing in public, chriswharton.me is where it’s all happening. Or find me on Instagram and TikTok at @cdwharton, where I’m posting the shorter cuts of all this.

Read more at Chris Wharton

Over a year on and I’ve realised that I haven’t shared my experience of having a digital product based business. Now feels like the right time.

Why did I give it up?

I guess this is the first thing you’d like to know. If you’ve already read about my income from themes, why on earth would I want to give it up?

Saturation, evolution and time. As more and more people began hopping on the Theme Wagon, the harder it was to gain exposure for a new theme. As WordPress themes evolved they became bigger and bigger and “monster” themes were killing off the smaller niche themes that I liked to create. I didn’t have the time to invest into creating a WordPress theme with 100 homepages and I didn’t have time to keep to a release schedule of 2 to 4 weeks.

What could I have done better?

As it turns out, quite a lot in hindsight…

I treated it as a side project

My first real problem was that I never treated it as more than a bit of “cash on the side” and “easy money”. I didn’t put full-time effort into it or set up the foundations of the brand and business. Almost everything was squeezed into evenings and things got harder the more themes I developed and had to support. I rushed too many things and didn’t spend enough time on it.

I didn’t put enough effort into the brand

I build brands in my day job but I didn’t apply the same principles to this side project. I should have spent more time working out what I wanted, what my goals were and what success looked like. On top of this I should have put something together to keep the brand consistent, be it a style guide or brand guidelines. I was just winging it.

I didn’t put out regular content

I had absolutely zero content strategy for my blog, zero idea of building an email list, and for the email list I did have, I was adding no value. At all. The same went for my social channels, namely Facebook and Twitter. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a clue about these, I just couldn’t justify the time to map it all out properly. When I did post, nothing was consistent and everything was often last minute and reactionary.

I didn’t have any ad spend

I spent about $100 experimenting with likes on my Facebook page and about $100 on Facebook ads once the theme market was already over-saturated. I had no strategy to speak of.

I didn’t spend enough time to learn about advertising in general

I dabbled in ads, but invested no real time or money into learning about Facebook or Google Ads or any ad network. I didn’t think about affiliate partnerships, I didn’t think about design or development partnerships. I basically faffed around and burnt my minuscule ad budget.

I didn’t put out enough Open Source Stuff

MeanMenu went down really well when I released it, but I didn’t spend time nurturing it, keeping it up to date and thinking about other plugins. Even though I had quite a good history with monetising my free open source plugins, I still didn’t put any effort in to this. Why? Time… mainly.

I put myself into a mindset that only repeat theme releases would sustain the business

I was always in panic mode, always reacting to a trend, a new typeface I loved, a gimmick, a quick fix, I wasn’t playing the long game. I didn’t even know what the long game looked like.

I didn’t look after my customers well enough

I just sold sold sold to my email list and across my social channels, “here’s the new theme”, “have you seen my new theme”, “BUY MY NEW THEME”. I didn’t put out any helpful blog posts, I didn’t get any engagement.

I didn’t look to comment and guest post

I should have made some alliances with some of the top WordPress websites that shared news articles, put together “top 10” lists, anything really. I approached no one but was lucky enough to be featured on a number of blogs and even on a podcast.

I relied too heavily on ThemeForest traffic

ThemeForest was a juggernaut. It still is. But the early days were the best days (aren’t they always!). You could be on the ThemeForest homepage for a couple of days when I started which is MASSIVE exposure to thousands of people. That dwindled quickly as every theme developer and their dog (other pets are available) came to be part of the gold rush. You’d be lucky if you had a couple of hours on the homepage some days!

I never set up a mechanism to sell products directly from my website

This was stupid. I know all about WordPress, WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads. I could have sold themes direct from my website for little effort and no cost outlay (other than my time). But I just didn’t do it. What an idiot!

In summary

I did it wrong, didn’t I!

I’m not looking back and regretting my choices, we fail so we can succeed and all that!

Will I start selling digital products in the future? Almost definitely. What I’ve already started doing is writing out a “launch pack” complete with everything I should have done last time so I won’t make the same mistakes next time.

I’d love to hear about your side project wins and fails, feel free to share below!

Read more at Chris Wharton