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Our Way Forward: The Big & Small Things
11. Jan, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
As we start finding our feet in the new year, we – as a company – are making plans not only about growing the business, but also about improving what we have and adding further value (as we have already demonstrated with the increase in our permanent X-for-1 offer). So whilst this may seem like a pretty standard exercise for most companies, we’ve tried to really delve deep into our ethos and ambitions in formulating our strategies for the year ahead (with a sneak peek of what’s to come in early 2010 here).
The “Small” Stuff
One of the things that has become more & more evident as we’ve grown & learned more about our customers (and how they use our products), is the fact that the seemingly minor improvements are generally those most appreciated. We’ve found that you don’t necessarily want us to release 10 new themes a month, but that you’d be happy for us to balance new releases with fixes & improvements to older versions too.
To put that into a little context for you… We will continue to develop, evolve and add new functionality to our WooFramework. Having announced a new version of the WooFramework in mid-December, one of our biggest priorities in January is to deploy this to all of our themes. We’ve also already started working on some pretty extensive & unique new functionality so watch this space.
We’re also spending quite a bit of time in refining our general approach to developing WordPress themes and it’s important for us to not fall behind in terms of best practices. This means that a dose of hooks, filters & child themes may be introduced in future (the developers amongst you will know what we’re on about), whilst not straying too far away from our own philosophies (until now) in terms of these. Other “small” improvements also means that we’ll actually be including styling for forms, tables & alerts for our themes (this may seem trivial and considering that most of our users didn’t even miss these, we could be excused for excluding these, but in our opinion this is an improvement and a definite value-add).
The “Bigger” Stuff
In comparison to some of our other plans, the above-mentioned tweaks and new stuff seems rather generic & small.
I’d venture out & say that 2010 is a significant year for WooThemes and if we manage to use the momentum we’ve built until now AND we implement most of the ideas we have, it’ll be an amazing year. The bigger stuff will include some major overhauls and the expansion to further platforms (finally).
“What about WordPress?” you may ask… We’ve most definitely got some interesting plans for the WordPress side of our business (these will always be part of the “bigger” stuff we’re working on at any given moment) and WordPress will remain our core focus, irrespective of any other projects we will pursue this year.
For example – our tumblog themes are coming on nicely and you can expect a release sooner rather than later. On the surface, tumblog themes just don’t seem as big as doing Expression Engine or Drupal themes, but under that surface, we’ve got some amazing ideas to improve your experiences: not only do we want to replicate the front-end of websites that are powered by Tumblr or Posterous; we’re also planning on replicating some of the best functionality in their backends and bringing that straight to your WP dashboard (this functionality is well on its way to being finished; so you better believe it).
To an extent, these new things will change the face of WooThemes, whilst also building on the image, reputation & ethos we’ve created & nurtured until now. Fortunately though, because we are aware of this, we’ll be clever in terms of never straying to far from what you’ve come to know & expect from us! 
The Balance
As mentioned right at the beginning of this post: we’re keen to find a balance in the multitude of new avenues that we will be exploring this year. You – as our customer – remain our top priority and if releasing themes on platform X doesn’t add value to your WooThemes experience, then we are seriously going to consider dropping our fascination & plans for platform X.
In some cases, we’re gonna be more than happy to be backseat drivers and allow you guys & girls to navigate the company to greater awesomeness. On other topics, we’ll take a firmer hand and lead you in the future with improvements, new stuff & better practices.
For us, it’s about the journey and that’s what excites us most.
28 Responses to “Our Way Forward: The Big & Small Things”
11 January 2010 at 6:55 am #
Sounds Great! Really looking forward to see what you guys do for EE 2.0!
11 January 2010 at 8:54 am #
Very nice, looking forward to the hooks and filters
11 January 2010 at 9:11 am #
Wow, wow, and wow. I was excited before… and now I’m pumped.
Bring on 2010!
11 January 2010 at 10:32 am #
Have you guys thought about skinning for forum software like vBulletin. I know Ikve converted two of your skins already to vbulletin to match clients forums and they love your desihn work.
11 January 2010 at 11:44 am #
Not really to be honest. If this is something that a lot of our users want, we’d consider it. But up until now, we haven’t had many such requests.
12 January 2010 at 7:03 pm #
I know that if you had skins for Invision Board, I would subscribe on a lifetime basis. Not even a word of a lie.
11 January 2010 at 11:10 am #
Always interesting to hear about what’s in store for Woo.
I recently worked with ExpresionEngine 2.0 for the first time on a client project and I’m interested to see how you guys structure a theme for that platform. I’m sure it will be some sort of awesome.
Looking forward to following you guys in 2010!
11 January 2010 at 11:41 am #
Drop us an e-mail on info@woothemes.com and we’ll give you a bit of a private beta of some upcoming EE 2.0 stuff…
11 January 2010 at 4:05 pm #
Great news, I’ve been expecting this tumblog for some time now and from what I’ve just read it’s going to be awesome can’t wait to get my hands on one !!
And the Expression Engines template are great …
12 January 2010 at 12:02 am #
We are definitely trying to do something special with the tumblog themes, as it’s an unique concept and we want to make sure that we do that original concept justice within the WP environment.
11 January 2010 at 5:32 pm #
I’m looking forward to getting woothemes for EE
12 January 2010 at 12:02 am #
It’s not so far away now…
11 January 2010 at 5:38 pm #
Sounds like exciting plans for 2010! Looking forward to the new themes and additional platforms you will be adding
11 January 2010 at 5:42 pm #
Nice focusing on the small stuff… we need a break from themes or until next Christmas with a 10 for 1 promo!
I guess Joomla is not in the cards?
Best,
John
12 January 2010 at 12:01 am #
Hehe, we’ll never be able to take a break from themes, as they’re just too awesome not to develop…
And we will be exploring Joomla in the year as well. We don’t have a concrete gameplan as of yet, but that will evolve during the next couple of months.
11 January 2010 at 6:47 pm #
Yet again I feel reaffirmed about my choice of themes provider
I am so very excited about the upgrade to the new framework for all the older themes; been checking this site (and my themes’ changelogs) on a daily basis since the start of January! Hope you’re at the finishline for that one soon, and I wish you the best of luck with the rest of your projects.
12 January 2010 at 12:00 am #
Glad to fuel your confidence in what we’re doing even more!
We are close to integrating the WF2 into all of our themes; so keep watching this space!
12 January 2010 at 7:36 am #
All sounds good so long as it doesn’t lead to a dilution of effort in the core area for subscribers. It might get disillusioning if you see EE (yuk!) and Drupal releases when you’ve subscribed for the Wordpress themes. But I’m sure you’ve got that covered.
In the “small things” department, I’d really like to see your demo theme pages showing more realistic content. The content in Daily Edition, for example, is very carefully tweaked to fit the theme’s limitations.
Your bloatware thumbnail script is also a royal pain. A quality outfit like Woo should replace it with something that doesn’t produce 50K thumbnails.
And while I’m complaining, I might as well make a request: How about hiring an artist with specific typographic expertise to spec out one of the your upcoming themes ? This is not to insult your current efforts at all, but you’d be amazed what a real type artist can achieve. I’ve met many artists and designers who were fantastic with graphics, but have a bad attitude toward type: they see it as a visual only, and the readability and communication suffers as a result. I think it’d be an interesting experiment to see what the return-on-investment was by using real typographic expertise. I think it’d be a winner for Woo.
I also wonder whether you might consider partnering with one of the interesting plugin authors for a theme or two ? Maybe for advanced e-commerce or large database handling ? A few themes that really extended the power of Wordpress would be more valuable imo than a scattergun selection of themes on different platforms.
On the plus side, the new framework and the new nav system are two things I’m very excited about !
12 January 2010 at 8:05 am #
Hey downsouth
Currently the EE and other CMS themes aren’t included in the subscription, but must be purchased seperately.
TimThumb is widely used by all theme authors, and the new version compresses to small size JPG files, so you should upgrade to v1.11
Until WP adds dynamic resizing in WP 3.0, we will still be using timthumb for our dynamic resizing as it’s the best solution out there.
Looking into doing e-commerce themes too
12 January 2010 at 8:48 am #
That’s good news with Tim Thumb. I see from a Twitter stream you’ve updated all the themes ? That’s a “big thing” worth mentioning ! Those PNG thumbnails are (were) hopeless.
I used EE for a few years and would rather use a cheese grater on my genitals than touch it ever again. But Drupal might be tempting – some data-heavy theme ?
But tell me you like my typography idea
12 January 2010 at 9:04 am #
EE 2.0 promises to be good I’ve heard.
I’m not really agreeing with the typography opinion. We have used many top name designers, and will continue to do so, and I think they bring a great deal of typography expertise to the table.
12 January 2010 at 9:21 am #
There are designers, and then there are typography experts. I have never met someone expert in both fields.
But I see we’ll have to agree to disagree.
14 January 2010 at 12:11 pm #
To be honest i am a bit dissappointed with this, would have liked to see it covered in my developer package.
I definitely want future releases to be available through my subscription! you can have a tiered subscription even with MAXIMUM $25 a month for Developer edition with EE access.
As it stands right now i wont be buying the EE, and probbaly will not even consider it untill its actually available through my subscription!
Mansoor
14 January 2010 at 12:59 pm #
We are exploring subscription options for EE in the future when we have released a few more. But they will probably not be available in existing subscriptions, but there may be a master subscription to cover all CMS’es we will offer.
14 January 2010 at 1:57 pm #
any ideas in how much this will be?? The is VERY important!
Mansoor
14 January 2010 at 1:59 pm #
No we have not gone into any details, but should not be big difference depending on when and if we do introduce such a subscription.
17 January 2010 at 10:22 pm #
I’m just going to put this right out there, as it’s a topic I think has been tremendously downplayer for three years (since Wp Tiger was released):
How about a new skin for the backend. Not just a theme-specific page, but a fully fledged admin or community oriented skin, like many offer albeit in HTML.
I do understand that Woothemes probably wouldn’t have the time or the market the fitting demand, but with a community so large it could come in handy.
18 January 2010 at 12:00 am #
Why would users change from the default WP admin panel though, since it has been thoroughly tested and it’s extremely functional + usable?