This case study was written by Stephen Ou, co-founder of the great, new, distraction-free WordPress publishing plugin, Artsy Editor.

Last month, Adii asked for volunteers to share their tips and tricks to the WooCommunity. I happened to be working on the marketing site of Artsy Editor. I think it will be an absolutely great opportunity to actually write about my process and share some of the things I learned along the way.

I am going to write about creating a product marketing site using WooThemes’ Simplicity, and how I took advantage of the turbo charged WooFramework to make the site super flexible. I hope you can learn something from it and build your marketing site using WooFramework!

Background & Goals

What is Artsy Editor?

Artsy Editor is a WordPress editor that helps you write more comfortably. Basically we minimize the usual hassle in WP’s editor (such as formatting, adding links, uploading & resizing images) so you can focus on writing.

We just launched this Monday and have a little giveaway for you guys. (See the bottom of this post.)

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In this tutorial we will add some social shortcodes after the content on the single posts page.

Social shortcodes single post

Simply add this to your themes functions.php file

// This will add the function to the woo_post_inside_after hook
add_action( 'woo_post_inside_after', 'add_share_after_post' );

// The function
function add_share_after_post() {

	// Only execute this if we are viewing a single post
	if ( is_single() ) {

		// Add a linebreak shortcode
		echo do_shortcode('[hr]');

		// Add Facebook Share shortcode
		echo do_shortcode('[fbshare type="button_count"]');

		// Add Twitter shortcode
		echo do_shortcode('[twitter style="horizontal" source="desaindigital" related="desaindigital"]');

		// Add a linebreak to clear the floating elements above
		echo do_shortcode('[divider_flat]');; 

		// Add Facebook like shortcode
		echo do_shortcode('[fblike]');
	}

}

Jay & Mike (the guys behind the beautiful FaultPress) are at it again with the upcoming release of SupportPress. Since the release of FaultPress, we’ve had many enquiries about a more “generic” version of the theme which could be applied to multiple niches. SupportPress is our answer to those enquiries.

SupportPress is a help desk & knowledgebase all rolled into one theme (much like the beautifully designed hosted service, Tender). We think this will be a superb application (theme) for managing your customer support elegantly and most importantly: on a budget. Expect the release shortly. Teaser below…

WordPress is most definitely an incredibly flexible publishing platform and themes are obviously doing a fantastic job in creating a visual showfront for it. A theme controls how your content is structured & styled, and although usually beautiful they are often quite rigid in the layout they use globally across posts and pages. Whilst this is something that most WP users have come to accept, we wanted to try our hands at some functionality that would place the control back in your hands.

ed·i·to·ri·al /ˌediˈtôrēəl/
Adjective: Of or relating to the acquiring or preparing of material for publication.

We designed & developed our new theme, Editorial, to allow you – as the editor & craftsman / -woman of your content – to have a stronger hand in how that content is displayed. We specifically target the way that WordPress themes generally handle the single post template, whereby all content is structured in exactly the same way across the site.

Content: Beautifully crafted. The centered header has been selected in the theme options.

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Remember the WooTrip we just had to London? Well just in case you’ve forgot or didn’t know, we’ve blogged quite a bit about it. First was our mini site to celebrate the trip, and for you to keep dibs on our antics. Next up, Adii talked a bit about the importance of the trip besides beer. Then he wrote about our passions working together. Finally, we blogged about the experience of all of us in one place.

Blegh, too much blogging if you ask me.

Speaking of these passions, I happened to study a little video production while in university and armed with my handy 7D in London I shot some clips of our trip. This is the resulting highlight video to the soundtrack of one of London’s biggest bands. Our other song of choice, Werewolves Of London, was voted out. Hope you enjoy the video (after the jump)!

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Earlier this week I was staring at my computer screen, looking at a blank WordPress post page, trying to figure out what the headline for the release post of our latest theme, Statua, would be. This was admittedly a hard task.

I eventually settled for “To All Photographers: Meet Statua”, which is one of the ideas that didn’t seem too stupid or repulsed me.

The thing is that I know I could’ve done something simple. Maybe something like “Statua V1.0 Released”. That’s clear, concise and communicates what the post is about: we have released a new theme called Statua. Simple. It is however also boring as hell.

We don’t do boring. It’s never been one of our brand attributes to be boring and we’re definitely not gonna start being mundane with the headlines of our blog posts either. I regularly laugh at myself for the headlines that I end up using for blog posts, because there are some really silly one’s in there. But at least they’re not boring. And some of them are even quite quirky I’d think.

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We haven’t released a dedicated photography theme for a long while – not since Exposure was released almost 2 years ago in fact (eek!) – so it comes as no surprise that the user-submitted idea of a Minimalist Photography Theme gained so much traction relatively quickly. We have therefore dutifully obliged with a smashing new photography theme called Statua.

Statua was designed by Chris Rowe, who has also recently been responsible for Simplicity & Delicious Magazine (with both sitting pretty on our Theme Leaderboard at #2 & #3 respectively for the last 60 days). Based on that we’ll go out on a limb and say that Statua will be another bestseller, as Chris has definitely proven himself to have a knack for designing really popular themes.

Apart from the design though, we’ve done some nifty stuff with the functionality that we’re sure you’ll appreciate…

Statua's visually striking (default) homepage

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So with our recent WooTeam trip to the UK, where we admittedly didn’t do much work, we’ve been a bit behind schedule on theme releases this month. Luckily for you though, we totally anticipated this, which means we had been working on the new themes for June even before we left for the UK. Yay us!

The first new theme you can expect this month, is a brand-new, minimalist photography theme. This has been a very popular suggestion in recent months and we anyway felt the need to release a more modern (in terms of the functionality) version of Exposure (which was popular in its own right in the past). The new photography theme, Statua, is packing some serious punch and was designed by Chris Rowe, who also recently did Simplicity & Delicious Magazine (both that has shot up the popularity chart).

Here’s a little teaser:

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Being the newest member of the WooTeam, it’s safe to say I was probably the most nervous for our recent trip to the UK. Not in a bad way though.

I’m the new kid in class, so to speak, with that I knew I had some harassing coming my way. Which I got in the form of initiation shots. Surprisingly, I didn’t butcher anyones name, especially with my Midwestern accent. Nor did I get lost as others did in London. This was my first trip across the pond to the UK and besides meeting all of my coworkers and seeing the beautiful UK, it was the first time the latest iteration of the WooTeam was together working from one place.

While this was a fun trip for all of us, we also did our best to tend to all of the Woo business while we hung out and got to know each other. An interesting concept if you think about it: most companies don’t take trips together and if they do they aren’t tending to any work. WooThemes runs itself a little “backwards” from most. We work apart for the majority of the time and when company fun time comes, we meet up and continue to work while doing so. I’d often work off some jetlag by staying up and answering emails. Definitely safe to say we love our jobs here.

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I wrote a blog post last week (as we were on our way home from the recent WooTeam trip to Blighty) about the benefits that we’ve extracted from the trip. One of the things though that I didn’t mention in that post was the fact that I truly believe that the WooTeam is powered by an exceptional passion for what we do.

The thing is that since we’ve never been based in the same office and we’ve thus never physically collaborated, it is sometimes easy to miss this passion that is admittedly there. I don’t think that we could’ve built WooThemes to what it is today without any kind of passion.

But the thing that stood out to me on this recent trip is just how passionate everyone on the team are about the work they do: be it by providing amazing customer / technical support, developing themes that are more user-friendly or feature-rich, designing to delight or continuously improving our website’s copy to make things clearer. Every member of the WooTeam seemingly has a different set of things that they’re truly passionate about and the work they do is the vehicle to bring those passionate contributions to the WooCommunity.

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So we’ve been in the UK for about a day now and have had our much-anticipated catchup & couple of rounds of beers. But beyond the obvious fun we’re having, this WooTrip is actually quite significant for us for a couple of reasons…

1. First Times

The WooTeam will be experiencing a couple of firsts on this trip. As many of you will be aware, it took us 16 months when we started the company to actually sit down and meet up in person. This means that Magnus, Mark & myself built a company for 16 months before we met in person for the very first time. Talk about trust.

So almost 4 years down the line, this will be the first time ever that we will be gathering as a complete WooTeam. In person. Yep, all 10 members of the WooTeam are spending a whole week together, which is incredible when you consider that it has taken us almost 4 years to get here. We realize that we’re a virtual company and all of us are located remotely, which obviously makes it harder to get together. But again, that just makes this trip all the more special.

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Day-in, day-out most of the things that we do at the WooHQ are about work: e-mail, support, bug fixes and working on new themes. Yes, there’s definitely a whole lot of fun sprinkled in there, but even a game of FIFA on the Xbox over lunch is considered part of work (we need a break every now & again to be refreshed and back at full productivity).

So we’ve devised a plan whereby we won’t really be working, we’ll be having loads of fun and we’ll be showing you a whole different side to WooThemes. If all goes according to plan, you’ll also get to know all of the individuals on the WooTeam, who generally operate behind-the-scenes.

Introducing Woo in Blighty

Tomorrow all 10 ninjas of the WooTeam board various flights from South Africa, Norway, Portugal and USA, as well as a train from Scotland, to meet up in London for our second Woo adventure, after the much enjoyed Woo on the Slopes trip in 2009. 

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