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Saving You Money
09. Oct, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Interactive
This morning I was randomly playing around with Google Lab’s News Timeline when I stumbled on two interesting, mainstream articles referencing WooThemes. The article entitled “How to Launch a Professional-Looking Blog on a Shoestring” basically went on to explain in great detail how a WordPress + WooThemes combination saved the author a lot of time & money in setting up a new website.
The second article about two mainstream news websites in Iowa who have also adopted the WordPress + premium themes approach, just drives the point home: premium / commercial WordPress themes save you both money & time.
Objectively though, I can totally see where this approach fits into the website design & development industry. Coming from my background of doing client design & development work with Radiiate, I can attest to the fact that both the time & cost budgets are much larger in comparison to the budgets you’d need to buy a WooTheme and have it modified by one of our Affiliated Woo Workers (only accessible to our members).
This does come with a proviso though… Sometimes it will be best to get a website custom designed & developed from scratch and a WooTheme won’t be suitable for every need / niche under the sun. But I think our themes collection is becoming more diverse & flexible by the week, so this should at least be a viable option.
I mean – just a quick glance at our Showcase (of user modified WooThemes) shows you how our users are implementing our themes. And I can promise you one thing: none of them had massive custom design & development budgets…
What do you think? Think I’m getting this spot-on or being totally subjective in promoting our products / services? 
16 Responses to “Saving You Money”
9 October 2009 at 6:06 am #
Well my opinion is Start with free move to commercial then final step is custom
Why i pay for Custom style for new site and then drop it
9 October 2009 at 8:09 am #
That makes perfect sense to me!
9 October 2009 at 8:59 am #
A good friend of mine is a brick and mortar or corporate web designer. About 90% of his clients live within 10 miles of his office. If he designed a wordpress theme for a client that would be comparable to Woothemes you would easily drop 3k on the design as well as the backend framework. In truth, Wordpress has evolved to the point that it should be considered a true CMS and not a blog platform anymore. Woothemes, make it incredibly easy to harness the CMS capabilities and build a unique website in the matter of a few hours.
9 October 2009 at 9:44 am #
A few years ago, I would have never recommended starting with a theme for a client. All of my sites were built from scratch or were custom WordPress installs. As themes made progress in terms of design, they became more viable options … and now with WooThemes, I do suggest starting with a theme as a cost-cutting option for my small business clients. With a few small changes, I can make a WooTheme look completely unique in terms of branding, and different from the original look and feel. Launching a simple website used to take thousands and now it takes hundreds (not to mention a fraction of the time) … while still maintaining quality design (and not one of those Website Tonight jobs).
And now I’m laughing because I just noticed your Facebook widget on the sidebar, and I see a few of my friends in your fan list … apparently I don’t mind getting the word out!
10 October 2009 at 1:59 am #
Hehe, that’s absolutely awesome Nikole!
Thanks for much for sharing sharing your (business) experiences relating to our themes, because ultimately designers / developers like yourself are probably our focus market.
11 October 2009 at 1:19 pm #
Saving time is an understatement. I use woo for pretty much every site I design. (informational sites and blogs) You guys make it so simple for the end user, I hardly have to walk my clients through how everything works. On a current project I am using a woo theme with one of the ecommerce plugins. Excited to see how it will turn out.
12 October 2009 at 3:18 am #
Look forward to seeing the E-commerce mod Shanna! And glad we saving you lots of time
11 October 2009 at 2:44 pm #
It’s the way to go. WordPress and some proper themes and you can open up your WebDesign agency. Whatever demands may come. Some theme or plugin will cater for it. Your themes are top notch. Enjoy the success and all the free marketing
12 October 2009 at 3:28 am #
Thanks Felix. Of course if you open a web design agency and are doing awesome stuff with our themes we’ll give you some free marketing too on our affiliated woo workers page – http://www.woothemes.com/affiliated-woo-workers/
12 October 2009 at 1:49 pm #
Woo is saving me tons of time with clients in the Political arena. That world moves incredibly fast – so it’s important to have highly customizable frameworks that I can edit as necessary.
To that end, yes, Woo Themes is saving me a boatload of time, which ultimately equals money. And I like having both time AND money.
12 October 2009 at 1:54 pm #
Hehe, it’s comments like this we absolutely love!
Great to be of help Stephen!
13 October 2009 at 1:13 pm #
I’ll be honest – the idea of joining a theme club always scared me. I kept getting the “What ifs” — What if they stop developing themes? What if they stop supporting older themes?
I’m glad to say that I don’t have that problem with Woo Themes and my Developer Package.
Everything is top notch and the framework is a joy to work with. If you’ve customized one theme, odds are, you can get under the hood of all of them. It’s everything that I’ve wanted in a Theme Club membership – from service to premium themes – and more.
Now… about that MyStream theme…
13 October 2009 at 1:44 pm #
Great comment; thanks so much Stephen.
For us – as a company – this means a lot, as we’ve done a lot of hard work to ensure that we can stay in business, develop some more amazing themes and deliver on our promise of releasing monthly awesomeness!
12 October 2009 at 4:51 pm #
I’ve been hacking free themes for ages for my websites. More recently I’ve been using some “premium” themes off theme forest. Last week however I signed up to the woo club as a developer and I’m blown away by the difference.
I’m not a web developer per se, but I know enough about html and css that I can customize most themes to get them the way I want. But I wasn’t prepared for how well Woo have put their themes together. The framework alone is light years ahead of any other wordpress theme I’ve ever used. You guys have made it so easy to build upon your themes that it’s saved me so much time adding the features and new look to my site that would have otherwise taken me ages to cobble together.
I had contemplated hiring someone to do what I wanted to, but having used a Woo theme as the basis it’s saved me a fortune and allowed me to do much of the work myself. Not only that but since activating my new woo based theme I’ve noticed a sharp uptick in my traffic.
As a freelance designer I’ve been asked a few times to create web sites for clients but as I’m not really a web developer I’ve always steered away from it, but the flexibility of using a woo theme as a basis and the ease of customising means that if the client’s needs are appropriate it’s something I can consider doing.
I hope this doesn’t sound too much like brown nosing, because I really mean it. Signing up for Woo Themes has changed the way I view wordpress as a whole.
So thanks for the great work and I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with in the future
14 October 2009 at 8:39 am #
Hello,
As Woothemes affiliate, I agree with you completely
Let me tell you about my recent experience (sorry for my english):
Until now, all the webagencies that got in touch with me only ask for “PSD to WordPress” jobs. They were not interested by the fact that I’m specialized in customized wordpress… so I did that only for small client. For example, can you recognize the woothemes there? http://www.quensis.com/
Last week, I started working for a webagency in Paris that wanted a woothemes personalization. The graphist worked from the “Coffee Break”theme. Are the times changing ?
Olivier
(It was funny, first all our messages were in english, before understanding we were both french…)
14 October 2009 at 10:01 am #
Hehe, that’s awesome Olivier. We love to hear success stories like this, where our themes are helping other people build their businesses.