Today, I spoke to Josh Mullineaux, who is the Director of Marketing and lead business development manager at Unique Blog Designs. Josh and his team have helped a lot of big companies and personal brands build their blog platforms, such as Yahoo!, MySpace, ShoeMoney and I. I’ve been their client for about a year now and they’ve helped me craft my dream with Personal Branding Blog and Student Branding Blog. I recommend Unique Blog Designs because they are creative geniuses and technical wizards in the blog arena. In this interview, Josh emphasizes having a goal in mind before you start blogging, then goes over blog themes, some lessons he’s learned and more.
You founded a custom blog design agency and have worked with some of the top bloggers, internet marketers, as well as worked with some larger companies like Yahoo! and MySpace. What are some best practices that everyone can take note of?
Everyone should start with a goal in mind when either creating a blog themselves or having one created for them. That is of chief importance in order to have a successful design or re-design. The more specific the goal the better.
Can you talk a little about blog themes and how someone should go about selecting the right one? UBD creates special themes, but what makes them so unique?
I think this goes back to the first question… Everyone should have a goal in mind when they are selecting a theme. Most people who are in the market for a theme are looking to purchase one for a specific reason. Whether it be for personal branding, branding a business, increasing RSS subscribers or an email subscriber list. Therefore, the bottom line is that you should choose a theme that will at a minimum accomplish your goals. Then, you can decipher based on other types of functionality, colors, layout, etc. If you know the audience that you are trying to reach then you can make an educated decision when selecting a theme.
We try to create themes that look create, have lots of cutting edge WordPress functionality, and user requested features. Our themes can be found at themewars.com. We also create very specific themes that are use as tools. Such as Affiliate Theme and Squeeze Theme.
What are some of the most valuable lessons that you have learned from working with the top bloggers and internet marketers?
There are so many things that I can’t possibly list everything but I can tell you what has been the number one lesson! We launched a theme built specifically for those who do affiliate marketing called, Affiliate Theme, about 6 months ago or so and did podcasts with many of the top internet and affiliate marketers that we work with. One of the questions we asked was, “If you could give people one piece of advice to help increase their online money making potential, what would it be?” To my surprise, every single person gave the exact same advice!!
It was to start building and putting major effort into a targeted email list! We were blown away that everyone gave us this same advice. Consequentially, as a percentage, we sold more copies of Affiliate Theme to our own email list than to any other source. This advice should not be taken lightly.
So is that why you created Squeeze Theme?
Absolutely. We have seen the results first hand of actively building a targeted email list and it is the advice that we give to all of our clients. Therefore we wanted to make it as easy as possible for anyone to start building their email lists. Not to mention, that Squeeze Theme also has a killer blog layout and tons of functionality built into it like the color-picker. Squeeze Theme will be available to purchase starting today.
Does the theme make a blog successful or the content? Do you need both to be perfect?
Well, the content more so than the design of blog makes it successful. However, the design should be used to enhance the experience of the user. So, you should be “more successful” by having an awesome design, for whatever success is to you. If you have a bad design it is also possible that visitors of the site will not be able to effectively find the content that was created for them and immediately leave the site. A site isn’t much without the content, but the design should be good so that you can make the most of the content.
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Josh Mullineaux is the Director of Marketing and lead business development manager at Unique Blog Designs. Josh is a blog consultant and expert who excels at defining blog visions. He writes a personal blog on the topics of finance, personal development and business development. Through Unique Blog Designs, he has served top clients, including Shoemoney.com, JohnChow.com, MySpace, Yahoo!, and Blog World. If you want to learn more about Josh, follow him on Twitter.
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Posted on 22. December 2009 at 20:03
I would not every do business with Unique Blog designs again. I did make a purchase awhile back – and I was happy with my purchase. This time around, I purchased both the WordPress Squeeze Theme and the WordPress Affiliate Theme priced at $297.
That was on December 14th, 2009. I knew I was in trouble when I saw the forum and all of the issues others were having with the themes. I went ahead and installed the WordPress Squeeze Theme on my server and spent the next 4-5 hours trying to get things to work correctly. I’ve been a WP user for the last 4-5 years and I’m a full-time marketer, so I know my way around WP really well.
The same day I asked for a refund from Josh. I got an immediate reply asking which theme I wasn’t happy with. I explained the situation nicely, and then nothing for a few days. I put a refund request in via PayPal, which Josh Mullineau denied.
Here it is December 22nd, and after emails including a voice mail left – all my refund requests are being ignored.
I have zero tolerance for this type of business practice and others should be warned about Josh Mullineau and the Squeeze Theme and Affiliate Theem for WordPress put out by Unique Blog Designs.
Don’t get me wrong, the product will be nice someday – it just has a lot of bugs and issues. The product should have stayed in beta until the bugs were fixed and then launched to the public.
I have no idea how many others are getting/feeling ripped off like me, but I encourage those who feel the same way and/or tried to get a refund from Josh Mullineau and he doesn’t reply to any of your emails to contact PayPal. Let them know the truth about what is happening here.
I’m sure I’m not the only person to have purchased the Squeeze Theme and Affiliate Theme for WordPress to have many issues. And I’m sure I’m not the only one whose refund request was ignored.
To get our money back…. I spoke to my contact at PayPal. All it takes is several of us to tell the truth and explain the situation about the product, issues we’ve had, etc. Once a few of those are in, PayPal will lock down Josh Mullineau’s PayPal accounts and everyone who purchased the Wordpress Squeeze Theme and/or Affiliate Theme will be refunded their money.
So sad there are still these types of sellers out there – but thankfully it’s a lot easier now-a-days to report them and get our money back.
Thanks.