It’s that time of the month again, where we’d like to follow-up with what we started last month and highlight some of the ideas (which you have submitted via WooIdeas) that we’re most intrigued about.

Here’s some ideas that are definitely on our radar and probably just needs a bit more love & voting from you before it makes it onto our various to do lists…

Continue Reading »

Don’t worry we aren’t going all Hollywood on you and creating “The WooThemes Network“… I think if we did it would probably be more a WooVille Manga animated film…

Instead, today we are announcing the release of a brand spanking new video-based theme – Premiere. Almost 2 years to the day since our last video theme – Groovy Video.

A sexy home page with featured slider and video tabber

Continue Reading »

WooVille has become a really popular feature since we introduced it towards the end of last year.

Initially we thought that it’d just be fun to share a bit of behind-the-scenes insight into the inner workings  of the WooTeam, whilst also generating some traffic to the site (this was probably our main motivation to start this up). Since the first WooVille went live though, we’ve found that the series has been a great addition to our workflow for a couple of reasons…

We hope you get to know us better. Sometimes joking about oneself is the best way to kinda be honest and share insight into who you are. And that’s what we’re attempting with WooVille: it’s not meant to be corporate, but instead it should give you an idea of who we are and how we work. We think that our customers enjoy the fact that they know who is behind the computer, the e-mails they receive, support tickets being answered and themes being released. It’s just our way of making sure we’re as personal as possible. 

Continue Reading »

When we first launched WooThemes, it was only the 3 co-founders on the WooTeam, which meant that most decisions could happen pretty quickly, efficiently and without having to involve a massive team with varying opinions. 3 decision makers also seems to be a perfect situation in that no decisions will be caught up in a “draw”.

We have however never enforced a 2 vs 1 situation that is sometimes just natural when 3 individuals have to make a decision. Instead we’ve preferred to spend more time discussing our decisions and whilst it would be impossible for all 3 of us to be similarly passionate about each decision, we at least want everyone to feel comfortable with the suggested decision(s).

There thus is no majority vote at WooThemes and we’ve never used the 2 vs 1 situation to force a decision through. This just isn’t the way we do business.

Continue Reading »

As you may know WooThemes hired their first Community Manager when they decided to hire me. Community Manager is a new term around here so what does it all mean?

Adii found this great infograph on GetSatisfaction that in my view of things does a great job of summing it up. Click here to see it full size.

This infograph takes a very broad view of what a Community Manager does, but it still makes good points in how the position applies to the WooCommunity.

Let’s take a look at a few things what they mean for us starting with Pinata, Sponge, and Gardener. My favorite description is under the Pinata, and a big part of what I aim to do with the WooCommunity.

Continue Reading »

Shortly after the release of Simplicity last week, we’ve decided to push out some “minor” – yet awesome – additions and upgrades to the theme. We’re thinking: What’s better than a small, incremental upgrade only a week after release?

The New Single Portfolio Page in V1.1

Here’s a couple of things we’ve tweaked:

Continue Reading »

With an ever-growing theme catalog, as well as continued improvements and new features being added to our themes and the WooFramework, it can sometimes become a task in and of itself to check your theme regularly and make sure you’re using the latest version (which is, ofcourse, preferred). What if there was an automated solution that notified you when an upgrade became available and easily upgraded your theme to the latest version?

Here in lies the conversation…

As I’m sure you’ve all seen, WordPress has a neat “Updates” screen which allows for the upgrading of your themes and plugins, as well as WordPress itself, through a neat and automated interface. Through our popular WooIdeas forum, we’ve received a thread regarding theme updates and would like to delve into this further. A quick warning, folks: This may get technical.

Continue Reading »

We haven’t released any video-specific themes for ages and when Sacha Greif submitted his design for a new video theme, we just knew that this was the design that would spice things up for us.

The new theme, Premiere, is almost ready for release and we’re building quite a few additional goodies into the initial release. We’ve also added an elaborate membership system to the roadmap for Premiere and whilst this won’t be ready for the first version, we’re planning on shaking things up considerably with this functionality.

This is what you can expect to be hitting your computer screens shortly…

Last week we hired Ryan to be our new Community Manager after receiving more than 30 amazing applications for the position. Generally these decisions are pretty hard to make, because comparing CV’s is probably not the most efficient way of deciding between 30-odd candidates. There was however 2 characteristics which made Ryan an obvious choice for the WooTeam (something which was also evident in our 2 other short-listed candidates): individualism & passion.

Ryan created a whole “Hire me WooThemes” page, which included an incredible video – which he shot & edited himself – to sway our opinion and hire him instead of the other candidates. So sure – we realize that not every candidate had Ryan’s videography skills and it goes without saying that our decision to hire was obviously not made as a result of his videography skills (as this itself doesn’t – yet – seem to be a beneficial asset to the WooTeam), but heck did that video sway our decision-making so much…

But, what’s in a video? We’ve obviously never met Ryan, which makes our hiring process a tad more complicated since we can’t actually have a sit-down and judge the character of the person applying. But with the video we could see two things:

Continue Reading »

Early last week my wife, Xenia, and I launched an online project that we’d been working on behinds the scenes for a while. African Cartel is an online marketplace for African artists, with the first feature being on a group of disadvantaged, pre-dominantly Zimbabwean artists who’s livelihood and income revolves around selling their township paintings at a traffic light intersection in Cape Town, South Africa. These artists are known as the robot artists.

My involvement with African Cartel was developing a website to house the artist listings, short film, art pieces, and e-commerce facilities to sell the art, whilst Xenia wrapped her head around the logistics of it all. I thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post about how I went about building the site, based on products we’d developed at WooThemes. I am fully aware some will perceive this as a shameless self-promotion, but to those genuinely interested in how we built the site please grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the read.

Continue Reading »

In the last couple of years, there’s one thing that we believe we’ve accomplished and that is showcasing our products and services online in a usable format. Much of what we have learned can be found (in various shapes & sizes admittedly) in our Business Themes collection, where we’ve applied best practice and all the little tricks that have made our business so successful.

Our latest theme – Simplicity – takes this experience & knowledge to a new level (again).

The Homepage: Simple, clean and absolutely beautiful

Simplicity is the first design from our proposed 6-part collaboration with honorary WooTeam member Chris Rowe. When we briefed Chris on this design, we asked him to spend a lot of time researching new trends in business websites. Then before Chris jumped into Photoshop, we fused his research with our own experience and we think the result is absolutely spectacular!

Continue Reading »

I’m into my second week here with WooThemes, and I just wanted to say thank you for the warm welcome. It’s definitely a great feeling to be welcomed into the community by everyone here. For those who are confused on who I am and where I came from, then just refer back to this post. If you’re curious what a Community Manager does, I’ll try and explain in depth soon.

Lately I’ve been brainstorming ways that I can bridge between you guys, our wonderful WooThemes users, and the rest of the WooTeam. The other members of the team are working their butts off not only creating beautiful and functional themes, but they’re there when you guys happen to break the themes and need help with something. We encourage everyone to try and customize their theme and break it if you have to, but it keeps our team busy making sure the web is a beautiful and working place.

With that said, part of my job is to be able to interact with all of you on behalf of our team. Email has been a big part of that so far, and believe it or not it’s been fun interacting with everyone via email. This post and blog you’re reading right now is another part of that. I’ll be posting as much as I can on the blog. For me it’s a place where I can talk to you guys, hear your frustrations, and even gather ideas.

Continue Reading »

Following up on the release of Delicious Magazine (and Chris Rowe’s honorary addition to our design team), we have a superbly flexible and elegant business theme, Simplicity, which we’ll be launching soon.

Prior to starting this design, we asked Chris to spend some time researching all of the most popular business themes out there and combine the best-of-the-best. Our opinion of the final product is that it’s absolutely fantastic and a guaranteed best-seller. Guaranteed we say.

Here’s a little preview:

We have a team of 10 hard workers dotted around the world, and whilst we’re absolute ninja’s at most the things that we do, we still have one constraint: time.

We realize that most of you reading this will sit there and think “Sheesh, I wish I had 10 team members to help me out” and that’s a valid point, but we obviously have a growing, hungry user base to support. Consider that there’s 45 000-odd of you in the WooCommunity, which means each member of the WooTeam is roughly responsible for 4500 users (or “clients”), quite a daunting thought…

The problem isn’t necessarily insuring a memorable, and positive experience for every single WooThemes user, we have a constantly evolving membership system for that (more on that soon), but it’s finding the balance and time to spend on developing and releasing new products. If you consider that we’re hitting our goal of 2 themes a month relatively easily (along with the fact that we’re continuously releasing improvements on the WooFramework / old themes and the themes we’re developing are becoming more complex), we’re not doing a bad job of managing our time.

Continue Reading »