The WooThemes Blog

We’re continuing on in our series called “Getting To Know Woo” today. Our next brave ninja up is Mike. Mike is a fellow stateside member of the WooTeam. We’re actually not to far from each other, that is compared to the rest of the WooTeam. He’s living about two hours East from me in Ohio.

As mentioned Mike is one of our forum ninjas, actually a master forum ninja according to our meet the team page. I’m sure if you’ve used our forums more than once you’ve run into Mike taking care of you. Outside of the forums he also takes care of helping create some awesome themes with our other developers. Mike and Matty worked on my favorite theme of 2011, Wikeasi.

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You may know who WooThemes is and what it is we do, but you probably don’t know much about each individual ninja. We’re hoping to change that now with a video series we’re calling, “Getting To Know Woo.”

This was an idea I had to not only show off our genius ninjas, but as a consumer I also like to see the people behind the company. This is our attempt at opening ourselves up a little more, and having some fun while we’re at it. I know Adii talks and blogs a lot about how WooThemes as a business is run, now let’s meet the people behind the themes, plugins, designs, and all the WooThemes goodness.

Our first brave guinea pig is Jeff. Checkout our interview below. Apologies if you have a hard time hearing, our audio will be better for the next one.

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We have quite the jobs over here at WooThemes, working with WordPress and creating beautiful themes. On paper it sounds wonderful, and it really is in reality as well. That still doesn’t mean that there isn’t any monotony to our jobs or burn out that may happen. Yes, even for founders of hugely successful companies the problem exists. Or at least I assume, since I can’t speak from experience.

So what do I do personally to keep my spirits high and my passion burning? Well I’ll tell you a little bit from where I’m at currently.

Inspiration In Three Forms

Unfortunately, my title as Community Manager counts me out from doing any theme development, which is for the better trust me. This doesn’t stop me from digging through our themes and tearing them apart best I can though. I’ve lately been really digging into child themes and have had a blast doing so. This provides me a good opportunity to really become familiar with our themes and possibilities provided by them. Which in turn helps me answer questions about modifying themes or if certain things are possible with WordPress. Given the open source nature of WordPress, people are always doing something incredible with it and I like to try and stay on top of what’s being done. This is definitely one spot that keeps me inspired, I try to spend some time every day doing what many of our customers are doing. Experimenting and molding our themes.

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We're Almost There

If you’ve noticed this little counter in our site’s footer, you’ve seen that it’s ticking dangerously close to 100 themes. Now, as far as I’m aware we’re the only theme shop with this many themes available for you to choose from. This is only made possible by our designers & developers relentless drive to keep to our promise of producing at least 2 themes a month. While it may make the decision on what theme to use hard for some of you, we believe it’s a great part of what we offer. Not only for our club subscribers that get access to ALL of these themes, but as we keep adding themes to our collection it’s a great value for anyone looking for a great choice of say business themes or magazine themes as our categories keep growing.

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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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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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One of my favorite parts of working with the WooCommunity is hearing from a satisfied customer. We aren’t always able to make everyone happy, but for the most part I’d say we get the job done and have many happy WooThemes fans from it. 100% Satisfaction is always something we’re striving for, but for some people we just won’t ever be able to put a smile on their face. I do think I’ve developed a bit of a strategy though in my short time and experience working with Woo.

Here are the ways I’ve found to make and keep WooUsers happy…

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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.

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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.

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