The WooThemes Blog

Over the past few months we’ve been settling into our new head office here in Cape Town South Africa, where 7 of us work from. Only three doors down from our old one that we outgrew in August last year… It has certainly taken a good amount of time to design, decorate and renovate the office, but we are finally happy with the end result.

A couple weeks ago a good friend of mine, the multi-talented Mr Andrew Schär offered his film skills to showcase our new offices and our day-to-day activities. He’s done a stellar job of documenting WooHQ in an epic cinematic style. We really appreciate his time and effort in trying to make us look good, and really recommend his services.

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Tom Dent runs a small design studio in Cheshire, UK and recently shared with us his experience working with the Canvas theme for a client site wanting to sell vintage clothing.

Hi, I’m Tom Dent a designer, wed developer and co-founder of Double D Creative a small Cheshire based design studio I run alongside my business partner Tom Denton… hence the name ‘Double D’. We’re not brother’s as someone once thought (very odd), but we’re good friends with a passion and eye for great design and have been creating creative, engaging and functional design for traditional and digital media since we started the company in 2006. We pride ourselves in the quality of our work and attention to detail.

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With only 3 days left of this year we thought it only fitting to sum up the whirlwind year that was 2011. I asked a few of the WooTeam members what their favourite themes were, and their favourite moments in the year, to summarise how much we actually packed into the last 365 days. In no particular order:

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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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A re-designed site called for a re-designed logo by Cobus Bester.

This is a follow-up case study post to “African Cartel – a Listings implementation case study“.

8 months ago I wrote a post on the blog about the launch of an online project I was involved with called African Cartel – its mission to discover and showcase the art of African artists. At launch the site was built on the Listings theme with the focus being on the artists, the Cart66 plugin was used to offer the e-commerce facilities.

Since launch it has received much success, with our short film receiving over 26,000 views and even a feature on CNN’s homepage, and many iterations with it being somewhat a guinea pig for me to try a variety of e-commerce plugins, all the while not jeopardising on the user experience. I’ve test driven Cart66, WP Commerce, and Jigoshop – some on the live site, some on the development server. All of them having their individual benefits, but all of them somewhat lacking from exactly what it was we needed.

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Joanna Wiebe

A case study by Lance Jones on building an e-commerce store selling digital downloads using Coquette and WooCommerce.

Joanna, my amazing wife, is an equally amazing Web copywriter, who recently left her senior position at Intuit (makers of QuickBooks and TurboTax) to build her own online business. Over the past year – and in her spare time – she has been helping Web startups and entrepreneurs improve their conversion rates by writing more efective copy.

Humble beginnings

It all began with a humble request for help by a start-up co-founder, and ended up on the front page of Hacker News (kind of a Digg for developers and start-ups), resulting in a massive wave of emails flooding Joanna’s inbox with additional pleas for copy and conversion advice.

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Steve Rio

Steve Rio – Executive Director of The Cheaper Show, as well as Lead Strategist and CEO of Briteweb spent 5 minutes with us telling us more about their fun, unique, and ever growing art show, and the site they built to market and showcase it.

I’ve been working with WooThemes since the early days when Adii answered the support emails himself most of the time. I’ve probably employed WooThemes 30-40 times in the past 2 years, so I’ve seen them develop from good templates to an excellent framework.

While I don’t always use Woo (some of our projects are highly customized builds where we employ our own base theme/framework), I think WooThemes is incredible and the fastest way to get a website from 0-60 in days or even hours sometimes. I love the framework as it advances, the shortcodes and in the most recent iterations, really impressed with the built in social media box widgets etc and inclusion of Google Web Fonts. Two techniques I’ve been coding in to your themes until they were included.

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This guest post was written by an avid Canvas theme user living in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK.

I’m Jamie Marsland the founder of Pootlepress. Pootlepress is a specialist WordPress development and training company. We provide WordPress design, development, training, consultancy and support services.

We love Woothemes and use the Canvas Framework for our WordPress training programmes and our new WordPress Xpress service (where we build customer websites in just 1 day).

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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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Nick Daugherty

This guest post was written by Nick Daugherty of Skyrocket Websites who has an impressive portfolio of clients and extensive WooThemes modifications.

To go along with the release of Canvas v4, the WooThemes guys asked me to write up a case study for some of my recent Canvas-based projects, which I’m absolutely thrilled to do.

My name is Nick, and I’m a full-time web designer from Los Angeles, California, USA. I’ve been a WooThemes user (and fan) since they first released the Vibrant CMS theme back in the dark ages of WordPress (2008 to be exact).

This post is all about TheButterflyCircus.com, which has been my most ambitious Child Theme modification to date.

So buckle up, grab a pencil, and put on your thinking caps. It might get nerdy. 

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Miami Ink. I mean Byron Rode.

A brief introduction

I am a Web and WordPress Developer and have been living in Cape Town for a little over 3 years now.

I have been working in the online/development industry professionally for about 6 years, but built my first website about 8 years ago. In my 3 years in Cape Town I have worked for a large internet outsourcing company, worked with another locally run theme development company that focussed on Joomla and was the initial lead backend developer for their theme framework and ran and maintained a small web development agency focussing on outsourced development and consultation. I have strengths in PHP, MySQL, CSS as well as few other programming languages and like to dabble with Objective C (Cocoa) and Cocoa Touch.

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Our Active Projects

As you know, the WooTeam is located all across the world; so managing all of our activities effectively, and making sure that we’re all on (approximately) the same page at all times, is quite a challenge. To help us lighten the management-load a bit, we – just like most other web-savvy geeks – use Basecamp to track our daily activities & tasks on one, easy-to-access platform.

So we wanted to give you a bit of an overview of how we use Basecamp for internal management, as well as interacting with all of our outside collaborators. At any given time, we’re interacting with 10 – 20 different people, on different areas of our business, with different WooTeam members in charge of managing the respective processes. It is thus quite challenging at times, but I’d like to think that we have a solid system in place, which has allowed us to keep most of the important things on the radar.

Here’s how we do it…

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By now you know that we’re a pretty open & transparent bunch when it comes to running our business. We’d like to believe that the experiences & knowledge we’ve shared has added value, that exceeds that of our products individually. So with that in mind, we’ll be doing a few “behind-the-scenes”-type posts every now and again, to give you a more in-depth look at the different aspects of WooThemes.

To kick this off, we wanted to share some thoughts on our Support processes…

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Sean O'Brien

This is third Woo Worker Interview (see Josh’s & then Kirstin’s interviews as well) and we hope that you’ve been enjoying hearing from some of the Woo-superusers.

We’re publishing these interviews to show you that it’s totally possible to contribute positively to your business by using WooThemes and also because we want to showcase some of the incredible talent within our little community. So today, you get to Sean O’Brien, but he’ll introduce himself…

1. Tell us a little about yourself, your design / development skills and how this translates to your (freelancing) business.

Maybe I’m a bit different to some of the other workers; when I’m not on a computer I’m usually at the beach or on a plane, travelling, training and competing on the international Windsurfing Pro Tour. I’ve been racing professionally for about 5 years but have had a relationship with computers ever since Commander Keen arrived in 1990. I’m currently 25, and reside in the Netherlands for half the year, and in Australia the other half. I studied a few months of ‘Communication Design’ (basically a course in using websites and digital media to communicate) but then ended up with a Psychology/Biomedical Science degree and plan to study Medicine if I ever stop going to the beach. So I’m not classically trained too well in computers but I feel this have given me a more ‘outside the square’ look at design and coding as I’ve taught myself, I don’t really conform to a certain style.

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Our second Woo Worker Interview is with a freelancer the other side of the pond of another Woo Worker who we interviewed last week (Josh of Cubicle Ninjas).

Tell us a little about yourself, your design / development skills and how this translates to your (freelancing) business.

I’m Kirstin, a 25 year old full living on the Isle of Skye (a small island off the north west coast of Scotland). I’ve been a webdesigner specializing in wordpress for the last 4 years and I’ve been a full time freelance designer since January. Although I’ve used a number of platforms, I homed in on wordpress as it offered a lot more flexibility and control. Most of my freelance work is tweaking and coding themes, writing plugins etc although I also do a lot of work with integrating forum and gallery softwares. I’m definitely not the best graphic artist out there, so I tend to be drawn more towards the coding and tweaking jobs.

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Josh Farkas in the Cubicle Ninja's studio

Kicking off a series of Q & A interviews with our Affiliated Woo Workers we have the awesome Cubicle Ninjas first up.

Josh Farkas, the creative ninja of the Chicago based creative company spends 5 minutes with WooThemes explaining why he uses WooThemes.

Tell us a little about yourself, your design / development skills and how this translates to your business.

Howdy! My name is Josh Farkas and I’m the lead ninja here at Cubicle Ninjas. We’re a creative design firm that strikes fear into the heart of boring websites. Our experienced designers have something special – passion.

Our goal is to build websites that are:
1.) Functionally Intuitive, and
2.) Emotionally Impactful.

Our unique advantage is that we’re a one-stop shop for all logo design, print design, and illustration. This means we can help you build a brand is beautiful across all forms of media, or match your current brand in the WooTheme of your choice.

What is your favourite theme by WooThemes? And why?

We honestly fought over this question…I guess the official answer is it depends on your goal. WooThemes are amazing because whether you’re building the next YouTube, making a portfolio, creating an online newspaper, or blogging to your heart’s content, you’ll have a handful of stunning options to choose from.

So you’re an Affiliated Woo Worker, right? What does this actually mean to you and what does the “job” basically entail?

In short: making people happy.

WooThemes, and WordPress in general, are being adopted by all shapes and sizes of people. This is no longer the domain of web geeks. So our mission is to ease first-time website owners through what can be a scary process, understand how we can be the biggest benefit, and provide speedy design and development to make their WooTheme perfect for their needs.

The Cubicle Ninja's Website - based on VibrantCMS

How has working with WooThemes influenced your business and / or earnings as a web designer / developer?

Before becoming a WooThemes worker, Cubicle Ninjas focused exclusively on larger projects. These tend to be with big companies where it can be a year until the final project sees the light of day. WooThemes has allowed us to work with real people on very small projects. It has been wonderful to see customers get so excited about our work, and has reminded us why we love waking up each morning.

Would you recommend WooThemes over other, alternative free / premium WordPress themes? If yes, why?

I would recommend WooThemes over the competition in a heartbeat. There are many reasons, but here are our top five:

1. Beautifully designed and coded
2. Infinitely customizable (usually through the back-end)
3. Exceptionally supportive community
4. Consistently Updated Themes
5. WooThemes Workers (Just in case…)

What do you think about the ease-of-use and customizability of our themes?

They’re as easy as can be. A simple administration menu featuring all of the options, with links to a clear and detailed explanation if there are any questions.

And if someone has heavier customizations in mind they can expand this theme to their hearts content. All they’d need is a little web design experience or a friendly WooThemes worker.

Anything else that you’d like to add?

A big ninja thank you to all of the nice people across the world we’ve had a chance to work with. And equal thanks to WooThemes for creating websites that are so much fun to play with!