All the latest news and announcements, straight from the WooThemes HQ!
Behind-the-Scenes: How we use Basecamp
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22. Dec, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in 5 Minutes With Woo
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.
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Behind-the-Scenes: WooThemes Support
30. Nov, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in 5 Minutes With Woo
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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Woo Worker Interview #3 – Sean O’Brien
07. Aug, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in 5 Minutes With Woo
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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Woo Worker Interview #2 – Kirstin Pauk
22. Jun, 2009 by Mark Forrester in 5 Minutes With Woo
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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Woo Worker Interview #1 – Cubicle Ninjas
03. Jun, 2009 by Mark Forrester in 5 Minutes With Woo
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:
- Beautifully designed and coded
- Infinitely customizable (usually through the back-end)
- Exceptionally supportive community
- Consistently Updated Themes
- 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!
5 minutes with Woo: Go Innovate
03. Oct, 2008 by Mark Forrester in 5 Minutes With Woo
This week we interview Craig Haggart of Go Innovate.
Goinnovate is a passionate, enthusiastic web design studio located in Leeds who believe in forward compatibility, web standards, and building web sites that are browser compliant.. We ask Craig a few questions about why they opted to base their recent re-design on a WooTheme.
Craig, you are using our Proudfolio theme, right? Just asking, because you have really done a great job of completely changing our basic theme…
Thank you very much I’m glad you guys like the design, and Yes it is true the website uses the Proudfolio theme, it’s hard to believe when you look at. We stripped the whole thing down and built it from scratch; kind of like dressing a manikin, the structure was there we just dressed it with our own style.
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5 Minutes with Woo: GoMediaZine
26. Sep, 2008 by Mark Forrester in 5 Minutes With Woo
This week we interview Jeff Finley of GoMediaZine.
GoMediaZine is a group of guys and girls passionate about art and graphic design. Their website is a great resource for any aspiring designer with a massive following. Recently they re-designed their website. We ask Jeff a few questions about why he opted to base their new design on a WooTheme.
Jeff, first up, we’ve got to say that GoMediaZine is our favourite modification of a WooTheme ever and you’ve become somewhat of a flagship of inspiration for us. Can you give us a bit of insight into the design?
Thanks, it means a lot. I chose Fresh News because it had a lot of the functionality already built in and I just needed to tweak the look. I didn’t want to just change colors. It was a big deal for me to infuse a little bit of Go Media’s rich illustrative brand but still keep it clean and well organized. I felt a mild textured look was appropriate but I didn’t want to do a “grunge” design if you know what I mean. I used elements from the memorable Concentric Circles Series that Go Media’s Oliver Barrett did 2 years ago that have become somewhat of a Go Media staple. I figured it was an iconic image that people associated with us, so it fit perfectly. And the hand-drawn-looking “hair” or whatever you want to call it is another design element that I have been using a lot in my work that people kind of recognize as a Go Media thing. We have a “hair” vector pack that is very similar. The choice of a deep purple was a new one for Go Media. In the past, our Go Media sites have been focused on the yellow (which was initially part of our brand), which I honestly think is a hindrance. I want to explore other colors, and naturally purple is yellow’s complimentary color, so it worked nice. The texture came from the back of an old record sleeve. Nice and dirty.
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5 Minutes With Woo: Steffan Antonas
16. Sep, 2008 by Adii Rockstar in 5 Minutes With Woo
As part of our overall offering here on WooThemes, we have decided to (in conjuntion with our recently launched showcase) publish some feedback from our users, which should inspire existing WooThemes users to maximize the use of their themes or entice prospective users to join in the fun.
This has thus resulted in the creation of a new section on our blog called “5 Minutes With Woo”, which will feature a quick-fire, 5 minute, 5 question “interview” with some of our users that we have showcased on the showcase (sounds a bit silly). The idea is just to give you some insight into the feelings of our users and their experiences with our themes.
So to kick this off, we have asked Steffan Antonas a few questions… Hope you find it interesting and find this new section of value, since we’ll be adding about 2 of these posts a week from now on. Enjoy!
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