WooThemes

As part of our overall offering here on WooThemes, we have decided to (in conjuntion with our recently launched showcase) publish some feedback from our users, which should inspire existing WooThemes users to maximize the use of their themes or entice prospective users to join in the fun.

This has thus resulted in the creation of a new section on our blog called “5 Minutes With Woo”, which will feature a quick-fire, 5 minute, 5 question “interview” with some of our users that we have showcased on the showcase (sounds a bit silly). The idea is just to give you some insight into the feelings of our users and their experiences with our themes.

So to kick this off, we have asked Steffan Antonas a few questions… Hope you find it interesting and find this new section of value, since we’ll be adding about 2 of these posts a week from now on. Enjoy!

1) Steffan, you have used Live Wire on your personal blog. Why did you choose Live Wire and how have you found the theme thus far?

Livewire is a magazine-style theme so it might not seem like a good choice for a personal blog, but I loved the 3 column structure and the post style elements on the blog-style layout. With lifestreaming becoming the norm, I wanted to be able to pack a lot of different kinds of content on my home page, but to also make the layout easy to scan to maximize readability. I didn’t want my blog to be just about my posts - I wanted to bring many different elements like Twitter, my photos and various lifestreaming elements to the foreground, and make my posts a part of the mix.

Livewire’s blog layout and post excerpt/thumb styling is perfect for packing a lot of content on your home page, while giving the site a professional, clean look - very few “personal” blog themes have this dense magazine-type styling, so I just tweaked the theme and added a widgetized sidebar to get as much mileage as I could out of the center column to make it work for what I wanted.

So far, the theme’s been great and the new design has been very well received. The site’s been featured on WP-Premiums.com’s main page, as well as the Best-Of-August roundup, on Mark Forrester’s blog and a few other smaller design blogs. All-in-all, since the redesign, my daily traffic has more than tripled and my subscibers have doubled.

2) Considering the wealth of great free themes available, why did you decide to purchase a commercial theme instead?

The choice to go premium, in my opinion, is a no brainer, because you get on-going support from the designer (and from support forums). I can’t speak for other Premium theme designers, but the Woo Themes team has really taken a lot of time and energy to make their themes compatible with popular plugins and services like Flickr and Feedburner. It’s a real value add, especially for people like me who integrate a variety of webservices into my blog. Blogging isn’t just a self-contained activity anymore.

People who use unsupported themes learn the hard way that code isn’t static - it’s always changing - WordPress is constantly upgrading, web services are always changing and plugins aren’t always compatible with newer versions of WP. Just because everything’s working on your end today, doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way. Just the other day, Flickr changed something on their end and something went wrong with the Livewire theme that had been working fine for months and I started having some minor formatting issues in all browsers - I went to the support forum and people were already talking about it. By the time I even realized there was something wrong, Magnus already had a fix and an updated style sheet available for download. My site was back, looking great in 10 minutes and I didn’t have to worry about it. That’s what premium gets you - peace of mind.

Also, there’s a lot to be said for being able to upgrade to newer and newer versions of Wordpress as the platform continues to expand rapidly with no real worry that your site is suddently going to go down. When you go premium, the designers do a lot of that coding and testing before you even have to worry about it.

Finally, having a back-end theme options panel was a huge draw for me - it saves me a ton of time and make Wordpress work like a system. The less I have to get into the code, the better. That extra mile taken by Woo Themes to integrate a lot of the functionality into thier admin panels is a huge value-add for me as a blogger - easy feedburner integration, flickr, video, ads, number of posts per page, layout, styling…it’s all there. Love it!

3) Do you have any web development / design skills? How would you rate those skills?

I’ve been coding HTML and CSS for years and I’m a photoshop semi-pro, but I left the design world about 5 years ago for a different career. Since then, I’m largely self taught so there are a lot of gaps in my knowledge with PHP, but I get by and just do it for fun now. By today’s standards, on an amateur to rockstar designer scale, I’m smack in the middle when it comes to coding and closer to the professional end when it comes to adobe’s design suite.

4) How did you find the theme from a customisation point of view?

It wasn’t that tough, but I had to hack at it a little (don’t we all?). The structure is logical and obvious to someone who’s used to web development and coding, but I wouldn’t recommend a novice attempt to make major structural changes. It would get messy fast.

The CSS however is gorgeous - it’s logical, commented well, and easy to follow and edit - just how coding should be.

5) Anything you’d like to add for existing & prospective WooThemes users?

I want to see other lifestreaming elements be brought into the WooThemes portfolio. Progressive personal blogs are doing a lot more integration with third party services. Blogging is becoming less about posting long thoughtful articles, and more about mixing long posts with microblogging and lifestreaming. I think you’d see a lot of personal bloggers invest in themes that offer built in life streaming elements (stylized twitter streams etc).

I’d also like to see integration with popular commenting services like Disqus and Intense Debate. I still havent gotten this to work on my site, but both commenting services are SO much better than WP functionality ever could be.