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.

Best viewed fullscreen and in HD.

Andy has written a blog post on his new site detailing the process and technical details of his SLR videography experiment.

Our next challenge – documenting all 17 team members spanning the world!

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.

I’ve been working with WooThemes’ themes for the past 3 years and am a huge fan of the functionality and ease of use that the themes allow and the freedom that they give me from a design perspective. FreshNews was my theme of choice until I dived into Canvas which opened up a new world of possibilities.

We were approached by a client who was starting up a new business called Red Hat No Knickers (nothing like that you mucky people!) which is a vintage clothing store that would sell hand picked unique items of clothing. We were briefed to create a logo, branding, marketing material and online store.

The difference with this store to many others is that RHNK would only have one of each product, so rather than having a stock inventory each time a item was sold, that was it – no more! What I needed to do was make it as quick, simple and easy for the client to be able to add new items to the store. I chose the Cart 66 e-commerce plugin (this was before WooCommerce had launched!) as I had used Cart 66 before for another client and I knew that it was an simple and easy system to update.

The client requested a minimal design so I set about creating the Photoshop artwork which was signed off so I could commence the build.

The Red Hat No Knickers homepage design.

The Red Hat No Knickers product page design.

The great thing with Canvas for me is the use of Child Themes, so I only need to work with the files that need editing, rather than having the whole theme structure to work through. Using the Hook manager also allowed me to add in code directly into the header/post etc rather than having to add it to the core file.

The Products Pages

This was setup so that the client could setup a product in Cart 66 and in the then drop in a short code to the main post with the product code number such as [add_to_cart item="1234"], this would then display the ‘Add to Cart’ button or show ‘Sold’ if the product had been sold.

The Red Hat No Knickers products page.

The main image on the page is controlled by the Canvas Custom settings and via Theme Options > Dynamic Images > Single Post – Show Thumbnail. This is selected with the alignment set to left and the dimensions set to 340px by 510px. I added in the below to to the loop-archive.php page to display the image to the correct dimensions on the archive page

woo_image( 'width=340', 'height=510', 'class="rhnk-main"');

So it looks like:

while (have_posts()) { the_post(); $count++;

		woo_image( 'width=340', 'height=510', 'class="rhnk-main"');
		woo_get_template_part( 'content', get_post_type() );

	} // End WHILE Loop

The rest of the images on the page are just a standard WP gallery, unfortunately the standard WP gallery style sheet is written into the post so it overwrites and values from the theme style sheet. I found the solution at this useful post which involved copying the gallery_shortcode to the themes (Child Theme) functions.php file. You can view the full code here. Then it was just a case of adding the following to the Canvas Child Theme’s style.css file.

.gallery{
height:90px;
margin:20px 0 0 0;
}
.gallery-icon img{
float:left;
padding:2px;
background:none;
width:60px;
height:60px;
border:1px solid #B95;
margin-right:5px;
}
.gallery-icon img:hover{
background:#B95;
}

The last thing to do was add in some social network buttons to the bottom of the page, this was easily done via the hook manager and adding the standard Facebook and Twitter buttons code to the woo_post_inside_after hook so that it would be executed at the bottom of the post and inside the Div tag.

Making it Responsive…

From reading the WooThemes case study by Kris Millsap on how he made Adii.me into a responsive theme I decided to get stuck into Less Framework.

Again using the hook manager I dropped in the following code to pick up the less framework file to the wp_head hook.

Some of the LESS Framework CSS used to get RHNK responsive.

The Red Hat No Knickers responsive design

I followed the same method as Kris, in working with Firebug and identifying the class or id that needed changing then amending the less framework file and as Kris mentions in his post it wasn’t as big a job as I’d anticipated, it still took a while to do though (around 16 hours).

Thank Woo for Canvas

I’m really happy with the results of my first development with Canvas and have already updated another site (getiton.org.uk a NHS site) with Canvas and I’m in the process of completing another, much more complex site as well.

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:

Ryan Cannon Ray

I’m going to go with Wikeasi as my favorite theme of this year. It’s a hard choice to pick over other releases like SupportPress/FaultPress and our first responsive themes, but I was tasked with this theme brief during our WooTrip. Thus the research I did into it leaves a special place in my heart for Wikeasi. It was then cool to see that turned into a beautiful and functional theme thanks to Chris Rowe and our ninjas.

Wikeasi - one of our most innovative themes of 2011, yet one of the least support intensive. We hope to apply the lessons learnt here in our theme development in 2012.

Our London WooTrip was definitely my favorite moment. I had only been with WooThemes for about 3 months and I was already jet setting to London. It was so awesome to finally meet everyone at WooThemes face to face, and of course was a great week in London.

Mike Krapf

Wow!  It’s so hard to pick a favorite theme as there were so many!  If I had to pick one, it would be Kaboodle, for the subtle texture, design and muted colors which really allows the content to shine through.

This has been an amazing year at WooThemes!!!  We finally launched the new backend, added new ninjas, released WooCommerce, etc., but my absolute favorite part was the WooTrip.  It was such a pleasure meeting the entire WooTeam and getting to know everyone.  The trip was a good combination of business and pleasure and having the opportunity to meet some of the WooThemes users was an added bonus.

The WooTeam in June in Newcastle, UK. Since then it has grown from 10 to 17 members!

Scott Webb

My fave theme from the year would end up being Emporium.  I love it’s flexibility due to designed specifically for WooCommerce. I customized my version to have a photoblog/portfolio custom post types in the back but I love it even without those changes.  I love that WooCommerce works perfectly and allows for blogs to become artisan store fronts.

My fave moment has to be the opportunity to work with WooThemes and then followed by joining the team to work as a WooThemes Ninja. Close second is launch of WooCommerce as I find it’s gone deeper into WordPress and what WooThemes is doing for it’s users.

Mike Jolley

FaultPress has to be my favourite theme because of what it started. It may not have been as popular as Supportpress because of its niche appeal, but it was the first theme I worked on for Woo, the first responsive theme, and the first to utilise LESS CSS. Certainly a milestone release.

My favourite moment was probably the end of our first month after launching WooCommerce. Seeing its popularity in terms of both downloads and sales was highly motivational, and its always nice to get the thumbs up from the bossmen!

Daniel Dudzic

Favourite theme of 2011: Canvas V4 - I’m using it in almost every project  -  saved me hours in development

Favourite moment: Joining the WooTeam. It was my kind of a small dream, to join WooThemes People have been very kind and supportive during the past 3 months. The atmosphere in the team is awesome, and I’m really exited to work with such talented devs & designers. Can’t wait to visit you all in WooHQ

The new Cape Town WooHQ office renovation which we hope to share more of next month.

Sven Hutchinson

For me obviously the highlight has been joining the absolutely awesome WooTeam! I have loved the responsive and app themes that have been produced. Also, seeing the rate at which the woocommunity have been putting together sites using WooCommerce in the blink of an eye!

My favourite theme was FaultPress, a real ground breaker!

Jeffrey Pearce

From a Woo perspective it would have to be the WooTrip and learning from the technical talks at DIBI. But from an actual hard work perspective I’d say the rate of growth that we achieved while maintaining our support level is pretty awesome, as well as rolling out the new backend and responding to bugs/feature requests for it. That was stressful but impressive as to how we responded as a company – not always pretty but we were pretty effective in my opinion.

Magnus Jepson

Favorite theme Currents because of the clean and crisp design and great use of google fonts, and also the story behind the theme. It was our first normal theme to be responsive and to use Less CSS.

Favorite moment was meeting all 10 members of the WooTeam in London, being gathered for the first time all at once, getting a chance to know the people behind the avatars we see every day online.

James Koster

My favourite theme of 2011 is SupportPress. I think we really pushed the boundaries of what is possible not only with WordPress, but (at the time) with html5 and css3 delivering a feature-rich, responsive theme which transforms WP into a kick-ass help desk app.

Hard to say what my favourite moment was! I guess overall my favourite moment was actually joining the WooTeam full time. But launching WooCommerce and meeting you guys (albeit briefly) at DIBI are up there too!

Kirstin Pauk

Favourite theme: Kaboodle. Why? Without doubt one of the best business/portfolio designs that WooThemes has released. Not only is the clean design cool but it’s jam packed with features and now with the kaboodle commerce theme it’s become one of the best all round themes.

Highlight of 2011: Launch of the new backend and forum. It’s unique, easy to use and alot less complicated than the previous backend.

Matt Cohen

I’d say, regarding my favourite themes, I’d notch it up to both the Canvas revamp, which was a particularly fun and intriguing project for me with all the additions, refinements and considerations that needed to go into it, as well as Wikeasi, which was, for me, a release that was elegant and quite avant garde, in that no-one had really attempted a theme with those features before.

Other highlights from a code perspective include the Editorial columns functionality and the unique approach to Announcement.

Highlights include the WooTrip, for certain. In particular, meeting everyone for the first time, our evening out at Picadilly Circus and DIBI. Included in that are the Shelley Point trip in January and the inclusion of another animal into the WooPen (along with the “Hoender” otherwise known as Jeff), in Mole (Warren).

The beach house we stayed at for our mini WooTrip to Shelley Point in January this year. Top left: Jeff serenading Cobus with love songs.

Tiago Noronha

My favorite theme was Teamster, the reason because it kinda shows the power of WordPress as a multi-author blog where each user has their own user profile, portfolio page, etc.

My favorite moment was definitively the WooTrip. It was was awesome to get to know everyone. The group meeting we had in the hotel conference room was great because we never get the chance to do that kind of brainstorming…

Adii Pienaar

For me the highlight of 2011 was the launch of the new backend after 16 months in development, along with growing the team from 10 to 17 members this year. And WooCommerce of course. 

My favourite release of this year was Currents, and especially acquiring the design.

The WooTeam tomfoolery in June in Newcastle, UK.

Mark Forrester

For myself one of my favourite moments must have been our WooParty in London where we invited the local UK community to join us for an evening of beers, WordPress chat and ten pin bowling. I never expected 50+ people to show up in a town foreign to most our team. It was great engaging with, and getting to know the people behind the online avatars.

My favourite theme was probably the the beautiful Announcement theme, and brainstorming it’s widgetized homepage modules and various announcement themed homepage layouts.

2012 is going to be a year filled with many more big milestones and new, innovative product launches. We are excited.

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.

As mentioned in the video, Jeff spoke at WordCamp Cape Town and that presentation can be found here. I also believe Jeff has his slides posted on his website.

We hope you enjoy getting to know our ninjas a little more. Let us know what you think, or if you have any other questions we should be asking.

Finally, be sure to keep up with Jeffy at the links below.

Twitter | Facebook | Website | Gmail

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.

Enter WooCommerce

A couple months back with the WooCommerce plugin in final stages of development it was the obvious choice to test drive our own product for this project. My wife and her business partner provided useful user feedback on the limitations of some of the previous plugins used, and where things could be simplified and improved.

Luckily we didn’t have many products to re-create as WooCommerce products, and only a few product variations, this because we’d specifically limited the amount of products African Cartel sold due to the limitations of our previous platforms. (Side note: From last week importing hundreds of products is no longer a concern thanks to the launch of the CSV product importer extension).

Now with the site using WooCommerce we’ve almost tripled the amount of products we sell and feel confident in listing more.

We use PayPal to take payments, with the plans to allow for South African payments with an SA payment gateway soon, once a currency converter is available.

A new engine behind the website called for a new theme

Listings was a fantastic theme to use with it’s powerful content builder quickly and efficiently allowing us to create the custom post types, and taxonomies we required – with it’s focus being on listing the artists. However, once the content structure was finalised and created the only custom post type we really needed was “Artists”.

With Version 2 we wanted the focus to be more on the art these artists wanted to sell, and given Listings was more suited for listing the people behind the art, with the products/art being somewhat disjointed we decided to experiment with the Argentum theme.

The theme port

Moving from the Listings theme we still needed to preserve the content structure the content builder had created for us – the “Artists” custom post type and various taxonomies to categorise the artists. De-activating Listings meant all the artists we had created and categorised disappeared from the WP backend. Luckily not from the database though, all the content was still there – just hidden.

The custom single artist template page.

Jeff wrote a simple, short plugin that activated the content schema and displayed it in the backend again, whilst Argentum, or any other theme was active. The realization is sometimes that certain pieces of functionality are better suited to plugins, while others to themes. We then copied a couple of the taxonomy archive and single artist template files to the Argentum theme folder.

Customizing Argentum

I loved the fact Argentum was responsive and the simple, clean, monotone styling. We felt the Listings mod we had developed for African Cartel was a little too colorful, and specifically designed around the township art, with the background image of the website portraying that. With Argentum we felt we could let the art, artist and blog content be more of the highlight and focus of the design.

The customised African Cartel homepage design (left), based on the Argentum theme (right).

The beauty of working with WooThemes is the template file structure is the same across all our themes, and the CSS is well structured and commented. I was therefore able to easily copy the top, fixed navigation of the Emporium theme into Argentum, as well defining some of my own page templates calling on layout and styling classes and IDs.

Working with LESS files

Some may have noticed, others not, that we have been experimenting with the dynamic styling language LESS in some of our latest themes to allow for easy and extensive customizations, by changing the bare minimum of CSS – in most cases just a line of code. I’d definitely recommend going to the LESS website to view and understand the benefits.

Compiling CSS/LESS files with the compiler. Simple and time saving.

Working with LESS files meant for only a few hours to create custom page templates that were responsive. More on LESS files in a follow up blog post soon.

Helping shape WooCommerce development

One thing I’m a firm believer in is using your own product regularly on external projects with clients and other amateur WooCommerce users. This to view it with a new set of eyes and to see where it’s shortcomings are in real life scenarios. African Cartel was a prime example of this that allowed us to improve our product offering and even work on new extensions for it that we thought useful.

The Shipping Table Extension

African Cartel required that we could add a weigh based shipping table with numerous conditions for particular locations, as well as a con-current courier shipping charge. WooCommerce Shipping Table extension was used, but adding a weight table at 100g intervals for various countries was a time consuming process with a very large table required.

Interface tweaks to the table rate shipping extension.

Using our real content, and live implementation of the extension on African Cartel we quickly realised it’s limitations and load intensity with so many table fields. Mike used this feedback to work on a version 2 of the extension with a far more intuitive and efficient interface, drastically reducing the load time, and the time spent entering the data via adding options to duplicate checked rows. View more on the table rate shipping extension here.

The Product to Media Link Extension

This extension was actually as a result of custom functionality we required for African Cartel. When in a blog post, on a page, or in our case on an artist profile page we wanted to allow particular images (art portfolio items) to be linked to products (art) in WooCommerce. It was quite a simple extension for Jeff to make, but we realised the custom functionality we required was actually quite a common, and useful feature of many other e-commerce stores, blogging about their products – linking the blog with the shopfront better. View more on the extension here.

Even more to come

With African Cartel we’ve seen the importance of interlinking different content types, e.g. artists, musicians, authors to different product types like art, music, books. We are working on an extension that makes the bridge easy. With your product you can associate a post to it that can then be displayed as a widget on your product listing page. See the below screenshots as a working example.

Linking a post, from the Artist custom post type, to a product.

The outcome - An artist linked to a product.

The next plan in the pipeline is to display an artist’s associated products as art pieces available for purchases on their individual artist listing page. But that’s a story for another blog post…

Disclaimer: The site is an ever-evolving work in progress and I’m not claiming it’s going to work flawlessly in the dreaded Internet Explorer.

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.

Copy Hackers Book 1

Knowing she couldn’t possibly help everyone who responded, Joanna asked what I thought about the idea of tailoring a series of copywriting e-books to start-ups and selling them online. It made complete sense to me. But should we sell the e-books on Amazon? Build our own site from scratch? The latter sounded pretty daunting, even with my experience putting sites together (you could call me a developer “lite”), as you have to deal with payments, refunds, PCI compliance, content management, etc.

Six months later, Joanna had completed the initial versions of her three e-books, each about 150 pages in length. Copy Hackers was born. Initially we thought we’d go with Amazon as our primary sales channel, but several advance copy readers had trouble with the length of the e-books. They felt too big to the developers we were going to be selling to. And so Joanna decided to break them up into 50-page PDFs, each one delving into a very specific area of Web copy… such as creating amazing headlines, stellar product messages, and get-your-attention-and-click-right-now buttons.

With this shift to bite-sized PDFs – which would eventually result in a series of 8 (or more) e-books – we decided to market them ourselves instead of on Amazon, using our own Web site, www.copyhackers.com.

The Copy Hackers homepage.

Building the Copy Hackers site

With domain name in hand and the [shorter version] e-books 1 through 4 completed, I considered our options for a Web site. Having a site designed and built from scratch would be time-consuming, expensive, and a pain to continually edit. Alternatively, we’d tried our hand at premium WordPress themes before, and loved how you can produce a very professional-looking design while at the same time get a fullyfunctioning content management system.

I took the plunge and spent $35 at ThemeForest, but after having installed the theme and several plug-ins, I learned that it did not support digital products (i.e., downloadable items such as e-books). Live and learn. Then I purchased a second theme from ThemeForest (this time, one that supported downloads!), but its e-commerce features were somewhat lacking. No real biggie, as the theme also supported third party e-commerce plug-ins.

I turned to reading reviews of several WordPress e-commerce plug-ins, and learned about the newly-released WooCommerce plug in. Since I’d already spent $70 on themes, the free and highly-rated WooCommerce plug-in was a great fit, but I was disappointed to learn that in order to make everything work together visually, I would need to modify the ThemeForest theme extensively.

But instead of trying out more e-commerce plug-ins for my existing theme, I decided to stick with WooCommerce… and went in search of a third and final theme – thinking that perhaps I should look at WordPress themes from the developer of WooCommerce. WooCommerce offered everything we needed, and it seemed extremely likely that using it in conjunction with a WooThemes theme would meet our ever-expanding list of requirements. We were not disappointed – and went with Coquette.

Out of the box, everything worked as it should. Installation was a snap. Configuration took no time. And getting it all working with PayPal Standard was surprisingly easy (love the PayPal Sandbox feature!). Even setting up the theme to work with MailChimp was far less efort than I had anticipated.

From there, we wanted to make a few adjustments for our online business. I [eventually] took WooThemes’ advice and modified the various templates using the Custom CSS option rather than modifying the core CSS file. I learned it the hard way, however, after upgrading the WooCommerce plug-in and watching a bunch of tweaks disappear from our site. Live and learn… again.

The shop page with Joanna's copyrighting books displayed.

We also needed to modify many of the form field labels and page headings, and I quickly discovered that WooCommerce and Coquette come with the ability to create custom language files. Modifying pretty much anything on a page template is simply a matter of find & replace via the theme’s localization control panel.

In all, we spent about a week’s worth of time setting up the Copy Hackers site. And on October 18th, Joanna submitted a blog post about her start-up journey to Hacker News.

Site performance and sales

Within one hour of submission to the site, her post received enough up-votes to hit the home page (where there are 30 other tech-related stories). And soon thereafter, her post rose to #2 on the home page, staying there for several hours and funneling a ton of trafc to the Copy Hackers site. By the end of the second day (when her post eventually disappeared from the home page), Joanna’s site received more than 10,000 unique visitors… and better yet, by using the same tips she outlines in her e-books, Joanna persuaded more than 500 visitors from around the world to purchase her toppriced product (and best deal), the 4-book bundle. For us, it was a mind-blowing launch, and our WooTheme didn’t buckle once under the pressure.

What’s next for us? Analyzing the recent sales and trafc data. More blog posts. PPC landing pages. An experiment with afliates. More e-books. And perhaps a go with PayPal Express — when it’s available in WooCommerce.

Thanks a million for creating something so amazing, guys! You’ve given us the ability to focus on our business instead of the technology that powers it.

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.

The Cheaper Show

The Cheaper Show is a grass-roots show in Vancouver, BC Canada that was started 10 years ago by 3 artists who needed a way to have their art seen. It’s now grown to become the biggest one-day art event in Western Canada and perhaps the entire country.

We received 1200 artist submissions from over 50 countries and hundreds of cities on every corner of the globe this year, all facilitated through the website. We are currently working on our first event in Tokyo (a fundraiser for victims of the earthquakes), as well as developing a business model for expansion into other cities, working with localized arts collectives and non-profits to act as Cheaper Show ambassadors in their communities.

Technical details of the site

Using Gravity Forms, with a hack in place to have the form populate a Custom Post Type (‘Artists’), we received all the artist submissions through WordPress. I then built a customized Curation Tool for our Curator to review submissions, and change a custom field to move entries from a Submission status to a Selection status or Rejection status. This way there was no data-entry and it was easy to create a custom loop to display the 200 Selected Artists by simply pulling Artist CPT’s with a status set to Selection.

The Cheaper Show website

This site is built on the WooThemes Kaboodle theme, which we essentially stripped entirely from a styling perspective to apply our typography-heavy design aesthetic and stark white-black-yellow color scheme.

We’re using multiple widget areas (8 currently I think), including 3 on the homepage. We’ve created multiple custom widget plugins to handle a diverse range of content within these regions, including a Custom Sidebar Block post type that allows creating sidebar blocks using the typical post edit screen and creating ‘locations’ to dictate where the blocks show up.

The custom artist archive page.

We use the Amazon Cloud plugin to host the majority of post images etc on Amazon to deal with the traffic spike the website receives as the show ramps up and international blog attention drives traffic.

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).

Why our customers love Canvas

Canvas gives our customers loads of control without them having to write code

We have trained over 250 customers on WordPress and Canvas in the past 6 months. I have been astonished by the diversity of businesses that we meet, from big organisations like Yell, the UK Police, UK Local Authorities like Hackney and Wandsworth, to many many small companies and charities.

The range of businesses that we interact with on a daily basis has truly surprised me and the number 1 reason they come to our training courses is that that they want control over their websites.

Our customers want control over content and they want control over design and they often tell of how they have been charged hundreds or even thousands of pounds for design changes and content changes.

LoveBerkhamsted - A WordPress & BuddyPress site built on top of Canvas

Most attendees to our courses are not HTML developers but ideally they still want control over every design element of their website without having to know how to write code. Canvas gives them this. Once they see what is possible with Canvas they are genuinely amazed.

What’s really great about Canvas is that it accommodates both developers and non-developers. Non-developers can use it ‘out of the box’ and achieve great results just by changing settings in theme options. Developers can use it to quickly build the foundations of their website and then extend their designs further with child themes and custom css.

Customers want professional looking websites that can be built quickly

A year ago I watched a TV documentary on the German housebuilder HUF Haus. HUF have devised a revolutionary way to build houses. They build them in their factory and then ship them in pieces to be constructed on-site. This radically shortens on-site build time, whilst still producing beautiful houses.

I started thinking ‘how could Pootlepress apply the HUF concept to web design’. How could we radically shorten website build time whilst maintaining quality? Well Canvas gives us the tools to do just that by providing a framework that can be implemented really quickly. In addition the wooframework gives us a great set of professional typography and layout tools so we can produce great looking pages.

So, 3 months ago we launched our WordPress Xpress service. With WordPress Xpress we spend a day with a customer and build their website on that day. It is a hugely collaborative process and it has amazed me how much is possible when time is restricted and decisions have to be made quickly. Customers love the immediacy of working this way and so do we! We are going to extend the concept and we are considering building all our customers websites using this methodology in the future.

A Happy WordPress “Xpress” customer

Using the Canvas Framework and a growing library of Child themes that we have built makes WordPress Xpress possible. It has been a great success so far – and we have only just scratched the surface of what is possible.

Pootlepress helped mentor and advise Gerry King on how to build WordPress websites using Canvas. This was his first project. Impressive!

Jamie uses his kids for some shameless marketing of his business. Clever.

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.)

What are the goals of the website?

Just like any other product marketing site, the #1 goal is to convert as many visitors into customers as possible. To accomplish this, the site requires several important components:

1. A clean, refreshing design that represents Artsy Editor’s style
2. Provides crystal-clear information to visitors
3. Demonstrates visual/interactive pieces of the plugin (screenshot, video, demo)

Process

Woo or not Woo?

I thought about building a custom website myself. But considering the time I have to focus on building the actual product, using with a WordPress theme is a no-brainer for me.

I’ve been a long-time WooThemes customer. Their theme quality has been well-known in WordPress community. And WooFramework, the engine that provides power to all the themes, has been the most flexible WordPress framework I’ve ever worked with. There aren’t any better options for me besides WooThemes.

What theme do I choose?

This is a tough choice, simply because WooThemes provides some many great themes that are suitable for a product site. I’ve looked at Apz, Biznizz, Delegate, Inspire, Optimize, and Simplicity. I eventually settled on Simplicity for the following 3 reasons:

1. The amount of visuals on homepage. As I mentioned before, visuals of the product are crucial. Given how much space (full-width sliders, portfolio items) I can present screenshots of Artsy Editor, Simplicity is on the top of my list.
2. The type of modules available on homepage. Mini-features, portfolio and testimonial modules are available. Those are perfect for any product sites. You can even use portfolio for a feature tour or some customer stories.
3. The overall design. Well, the design just feels *right*.

Setting Up the Slider

Now I’ve chosen the theme, it’s time to build the site. The first thing I want to talk about is how I customized the slider.

Because the only difference between two slides is the headline and the screenshot, instead of entering the same content 5 times in WP admin, I decided to customize the slider template (includes/featured.php) a little bit.

I plugged in the title directly in h2′s and used the increment count to get the correct image source.

Setting Up Testimonials

I made 2 modifications to maximize the effects of our testimonials.

1. Show multiple testimonials together. Instead of fading through one at a time, I wanted to show multiple testimonials at the same time to build up credibility. All I had to do was disable the innerfade script in theme-js.php and added some custom CSS.
2. Use author’s Twitter profile image instead of standard quote icon, mainly to add visual appeals. In every testimonial post, I typed in author’s Twitter username as the tile, so I can utilize it in the template to produce its correspoding image tag.

Setting up the Pricing Area

This was the part where I put in the most work because there wasn’t a specific modules designed for it. But don’t worry, this is where custom templates and template parts come into play.

I hand-coded the HTML and stored it in includes/pricing.php as a template part. Then in index.php, I could simply call get_template_part(‘includes/pricing’); to include the pricing content.

If anyone is interested in the CSS style of these 3 pricing columns, you can take a look here.

Setting up the Call-to-Action

I personally think all buttons that come with WooFramework’s Shortcodes functionality are the ultimate time-savers. All buttons you see on our site were created using one line of shortcode. They come with beautiful pre-defined style at a variety of colors, sizes, and icons. I can guarantee it would take me 2+ hours to make them myself, probably less attractive.

Results

It’s still early to draw any conclusive data on whether the site is effective on selling the product. But given the positive feedback I’ve received from people, I am sure it will make a positive impact on Artsy Editor.

A Little Giveaway for WooCommunity

Since Artsy Editor is relevant tool for you designers and developers who built WordPress websites for clients, we have partnered with Artsy Editor to give away 10 developer licenses (normally worth $199) for free. Use the PunchTab widget below to enter the competition.

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. 

Getting the Call

The Butterfly Circus Website

“The Butterfly Circus” is an award-winning short film seen now by more than 10 million people worldwide. It’s got an inspirational, heart-warming message about a man with no arms or legs who finds purpose and meaning in his life in the most unlikely of places – a carnival sideshow.

The film’s creators called me late last year in a bit of a rush, because the film had been released and their website wasn’t quite ready. And they needed help. Fast.

“We wanted to build it in WordPress,” they told me. “But we’re not sure WordPress can do what we want anymore. And now we’re stuck.”

To Woo or Not to Woo

I’m always up for a challenge, and this sounded like a good one. So I jumped in the car and drove to their office in L.A. to see if I might lend a little assistance.

They had a very specific design concept for the website and wanted to make sure the site looked authentic to the time period. (Think 1930’s – Great Depression era).

Another designer had actually started the project for them and ran up a huge bill trying to create his own custom WordPress theme from scratch, before getting frustrated and giving up.

My first decision as their new lead designer was whether to try and continue working with their existing code, or rebuilding everything within a WordPress theme framework I knew (and trusted) already.

A Canvas Child Theme

I opted to use the Canvas theme, and immediately created a child theme (using Magnus’ tutorial) to house the major styling/layout customizations that would be required. Then piece-by-piece, I extracted the graphical elements from the site, methodically adjusting the CSS and javascript until it looked right.

As you can see below, the Canvas theme looks vastly different to the end result of the Butterfly Circus child theme. These changes were a combination of overwriting the default Canvas element styling in the CSS, adding in some custom theme options, an animated homepage, and a few custom page templates.

The Butterfly Circus, based on the Canvas theme.

The Ornate Frame, Circus Navigation, and Other Decorative Elements

My biggest challenge in developing the site was finding creative ways to manipulate the design using CSS only. For simplicity’s sake, I didn’t want to change the HTML or PHP code inside the Canvas theme’s default templates if I didn’t have to.

The Circus Navigation was accomplished by putting the logo in the “Header Background Image” box (under Header Styling) instead of the “Custom Logo” box (under General Settings) of the Canvas Theme Options.

The navigation menu.

Next, I created a custom menu (under Appearance >> Menus) and grabbed the IDs for each list item (using Firebug). That allowed me to add CSS position and background image elements for each item in the Navigation, and ultimately “split” the navigation in the center.

Styling the navigation menu

The Expanding Ornate Frame was central to the design, since it frames all the content for the site. This was tricky, since it required breaking up the frame into 3 parts:

• Top – the top of the frame hooks into the #main element of the page and uses a z-index call to keep it on top.
• Middle – this is the “expanding” part. It’s a repeating, semi-transparent black background that hooks into the #content element of the page.
• Bottom – this was the only part where I had to add a new HTML element to the page. There were no viable CSS hooks to put in the bottom of the frame, so I made my own
  and hooked it in with the woo_footer_top action hook inside my functions.php file. Finally, I added the CSS to call the background image and used a z-index call to layer it properly.

A Flashy Homepage… Without Using Flash

It turns out that you don’t really need Flash to do some cool intro animations for your homepage. It’s totally possible with simple jQuery animations.

Don’t panic – if you’ve ever animated a slide in PowerPoint, this is really similar. The trick is to work backwards.

Here’s how I did mine…

• I created a custom page template called template-animation.php and added each of the HTML elements (mostly images) to the template.
• I positioned each of the images absolutely using CSS to put them into position.
• Once that was done, I turned to animating each element to either “fade in” or “slide in.”
• Using a little jQuery (in a file called homepage-animation.js) I broke up the animation into 5 phases that begin on page load. 

The syntax I used to make each element fade in looks like this:
jQuery(‘#blueButterfly’).show().css({opacity:0}).animate({opacity:1},1200);
• Finally, I added a wp_enqueue_script call inside my functions.php file to call my custom animation javascript on the homepage.

Looks cool, huh? When you put it all together, it makes for a striking user experience.

Other notable additions/changes to the theme were:

• A photo scroller for the Cast page – borrowed from the Object theme
• Google Font substitution throughout – we chose “Josefin Sans” since it provided the most authentic look and feel for the era
• A new custom page template for the Butterfly Circus short film
• Custom “Post More” section below each post – modified to show Facebook/Twitter buttons (using the built-in Woo Shortcodes of course)
• A custom footer widget for email signups that matches the look/feel of the site.

More Technical Additions: Custom Backgrounds

One of the client’s initial requests was to have custom background images for each page on the site. This seemed like a great opportunity to practice customizing theme options through a child theme.

After trying several options, I ended up with a custom metabox inside the WP page editor, like this:

Creating custom meta boxes in the page editor

Finally, I wrote a little function inside the child theme’s functions.php file to hook into the woo_head action hook, similar to the way the “Custom CSS” box inside the Canvas Theme Options works. (It dynamically puts your custom CSS inside the section of your theme’s header.php file.)

If you’re interested, there’s more on using hooks and filters in Mark’s tutorial.

E-commerce Facilities

Another major part of the website was having an online store where the filmmakers could sell copies of their DVDs directly to fans.

Being a follower of the guys over at WPMU DEV, I decided to use their new e-commerce plugin called MarketPress. I like it because it uses the built-in custom post types functionality in WordPress 3. No need for a bunch of messy MYSQL tables cluttering up the database anymore. Plus, it’s built to work natively with WP Multisite and BuddyPress, if you’re into that sort of thing.

MarketPress allowed us to create both internal and external (or affiliate) products in the backend, then quickly setup an entire store, complete with a shopping cart and custom coupons, by adding a simple shortcode to a WordPress page.

Example product listing inside the MarketPress plugin

Now the filmmakers can sell DVDs direct to fans, as well as sell their soundtrack through iTunes — all the while keeping the user on the site, until it’s time to checkout (through PayPal Express Payments).

Other third party plugins

Like many other WooFans, I’ve come to love Gravity Forms. It lets me create advanced contact forms with multiple routing options in no time at all. The drag-and-drop interface is so intuitive a caveman can use it. Plus, it integrates nicely with Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor for email marketing.

We’re also using these plugins on the site:

• Analytics360 – to pull Google Analytics and Mailchimp data directly into the WP dashboard
• Rank Tracker – to show the filmmakers what keywords and position their pages are ranking for in Google

Conclusions

A few people have asked me why in the world I would start over on a project that was already halfway complete.

For me, the time and effort necessary to adjust the layout and graphical elements of a website is minimal compared to the time and effort (and hardcore coding knowhow) required to create a back-end framework that’s reliable, extensible, and easy for the client to use.

WooThemes’ code is written in a way that’s relatively easy to understand and modify. Plus, they’ve already done the heavy lifting with the WooFramework that powers the backend of their themes.

Finally, all the theme options, code hooks, and other goodies (like shortcodes) that Canvas gives me made it a snap to deliver a great-looking website in just over a week.

Things get a little nerdy sometimes, but with WooThemes you really don’t have to be an expert at HTML, CSS, PHP, or Javascript to deliver stunning results. However, I do recommend that you learn “enough to be dangerous” in each of these languages (in that order).

I think the best way is to start with a theme like Canvas and experiment with it. Get your hands dirty by playing with the code and let your imagination run wild.

Feel free to browse the site and watch the movie. Please post any questions you might have below, and I’ll do my best to answer them. And if you’d like to support the filmmakers, consider getting a copy of The Butterfly Circus DVD as well.

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.

I recently closed my business doors to start working full time for the Bobs for Good Foundation as the Web and Content Manager, and I am responsible for all online fronts, including web, email campaigns, social media projects as well as all domain and server administration. As a professional photographer – focussing on events, portraiture, bands and live music – I am also the Foundation’s photographer and you can find me at all our events behind the camera capturing all the action.  I also look after all of Bob Skinstad‘s online endeavours including his personal websites and email/social campaigns.

What was the web brief Bob Skinstad provided you?

Bob Skinstad - Former Springbok rugby player, sports commentator, and general do-gooder.

The initial brief I received from Bob and the Foundation was to rebuild and restructure the Foundation’s online store and website, as well as rebuild Bob’s personal website. Our first discussions were to integrate and align the websites which had all been done pro-bono and were un-aligned and had no relation to one another and then from there on, maintain the websites. I was asked to bring my expertise to the table and bring the websites up to a standard that both viewers and the Foundation would be proud of.

Bob’s personal website was in a bit of disarray and needed to be rebuilt and given a bit of theme and direction. We initially had decided to work on Bob’s personal brand, but later shifted the focus towards something that is more relative to Bob, and that is travel and rugby.

The brief and timelines have all changed slightly as we have developed and integrated new technologies and idea’s and are constantly being tweaked and modified to keep with current trends and the initial goals of all the websites and as such, all are currently and will most likely stay as Works-in-Progress.

Why did you pick the Canvas theme?

Personally I had always been itching to use any of the premium themes that WooThemes were pushing out, but had never had a project that really called for it, and when I started working with Bob and the Foundation, it was the perfect opportunity to dig my hands into the framework. Canvas seemed like the perfect theme to use, as it provided full access to the WooFramework – that the free themes I had played with didn’t – without having a design that had any real focus on a specific style/genre. Fortunately for us and me, WooThemes provided us with a developer license for any theme of our choosing as a sponsorship to Bob and the Bobs for Good Foundation. I investigated a few themes just to keep my options open, but chose the Canvas theme both on the points mentioned above as well as on recommendation from WooThemes, Mark Forrester, as it provided a solid foundation for us to work from.

Rugby Journal - Bob's Skinstad's rugby adventures around the world. Designed on the Canvas Theme.

What was it like working with our themes?

Working with the themes has been extremely easy, and besides learning my way around the file, class and function structures – which is natural when starting work with any framework, theme related or not – it has helped increase development times and make sure that there really is a solid base with which to run from. There are definitely some improvements or tweaks that could be made to the framework as a whole, and I did run into some snags with some of the custom options that the Canvas theme offered, but the strength of the framework made it very easy to adapt or change where necessary. Overall, I have never been a very framework-orientated person and have preferred to build my own, but working with the WooFramework from a development point of view has been an easy adjustment and a fantastic platform to work from.

Bob's for Good Foundation - restoring dignity and pride to South Africa’s neediest learners by giving them a gift of hope – a pair of quality leather, locally-made school shoes to care for and call their own. Also based on the Canvas theme.

Any functionality-enhancements/features you are currently working into the sites?

I am currently working on a few enhancements to both the WooFramework and theme as well as having built a few custom plugins that were necessary for the websites to have the functionality that we required and that WordPress lacks. The biggest plugin that is in development at this moment is a full-blown iCal ready Events Calendar. We are currently using a very popular calendar on our events page, but due to the lack of certain functionality we require, I have opted to build a custom option. We are also working on a section on our website that will integrate with the Google Maps API. I won’t go into too much detail as we don’t want to spoil it for our viewers, but I can say we want to make the sections on our website that require it, very interactive. So imagine a plugin, with GPS, Google Maps and a touch of Cocoa.

Any recommendations on how we can improve the theme/framework?

There are not many that I can think of at this point, except for the 3 that I have come across and made (some) adjustments to.

• Optimization of HTTP Requests – because of the number of JS and CSS files being called, HTTP requests are quite high and it would great to have them combined into single JS and CSS files. Having this as an on/off switch in the backend would be great – I did look into this initially but because of time constraint and a known limitation with WP and using the enqueue_script function to prevent duplication of scripts loading I put it on the backburner.
• The sliders (business/magazine) need to be able to use either pages or posts. I have made a modification to the functions to allow for both post or page ID’s to be used.
• File/Folder structure – The CSS (non-child theme related) files and JS files and overall file structure could be neatened into a better folder structure – this is not necessarily an improvement on the framework, but more a personal recommendation and pet-peeve, as currently JS file are kept in a sub folder and then CSS files are kept in a few different locations.

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…

Less E-mail; Permanent Storage

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of our Basecamp-usage, I need to explain why we use the platform… For obvious reasons, we’re trying to eliminate unnecessary e-mails (those where everyone needs to be CC’ed) between team members; so with Basecamp the information is accessible to everyone that might need to see it, but only the people that need the info to act upon it, get notified. The whole team thus knows what’s going on (with Basecamp acting as a status report of kinds) and they have the option of checking in on this any time they want or need to (not when they’re e-mailed unnecessarily).

The second main reason for using Basecamp (over e-mail), is the fact that all of our most important data, decisions & discussions are kept in one, central place. This is important, considering our geographical differences, as well as helping us when we’re not at our normal workplace (i.e. traveling). We’ve also found that this is great for accountability & efficiency in making sure that all to-do’s are handled in due time & as planned.

Milestones & To-do’s

We aren’t extremely “strict” when it comes to committing to deadlines or living by a rigid to-do list. But in recent weeks, we’ve tried to include some of the most important stuff as milestones. Have a look…

Milestones

With this approach to To-do’s & Milestones, I think we’re giving the whole team quite an overview of what’s happening in the future. So the to-do’s aren’t as much a medium to make sure all of the work gets done, but rather puts the work we’re doing at the moment in context (since the to-do’s relate to future milestones). To explain: when you’re doing WordPress development day-in, day-out, it becomes difficult to see the holistic view of all the activities, but with proper milestones, we are constantly reminded of upcoming stuff.

Collaborations

Another extremely important feature of our business, is the fact that we absolutely love to collaborate with cool people outside of our own team. This has lead to us working with some of the best web designers around at the moment and recently also enabled us to translate all of our themes into 15+ languages.

In recent weeks though, we’ve found an even more valuable use for Basecamp collaborations with our beta testers, who has helped us iron out bugs in our themes, prior to release.

The Beta Free-for-All

The first thing we do via Basecamp, is to give our beta testers access to upcoming themes and then we facilitate the conversation surrounding possible bugs & tweaks on there. We have however also opened it up to posting theme concepts (i.e. ideas or designs only) on there for feedback, whilst any of the beta testers can start a new topic on anything. The great thing about this interaction is that it’s not being limited or organized; so we’re allowed access to some awesome ideas that are generated by our beta testers (who are some of the coolest WooThemes users around).

Conclusion

As I’m sure you can see, Basecamp is an integral part of the way we operate and whilst I wouldn’t go as far as saying that we’d be lost without it; we’d definitely not be able to run as smoothly as we do without it.

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…

Support Resources

Since our themes are GPL licensed, there’s a big emphasis on all of our support resources (which includes the forum, our knowledgebase, tutorials and also our Affiliated Woo Workers). You’ll note that you’d only be able to see those pages if you were a WooThemes customer, because those have been “locked down” for general public use.

Why? Well, as mentioned there’s a massive emphasis within our business on creating top-notch, valuable resources that are only available to WooUsers. Since piracy is becoming more and more of an issue (plus legally our themes are allowed to be distributed), we need to make sure that only paying customers get the benefit of these fantastic resources.

In the same vein, we’ve been spending quite a bit of time of late improving our theme documentation, as that is probably one of the most valuable resources that our members have available to them. Our focus is thus on maintaining and improving these resources, which further justifies the price tag associated with being a WooThemes member.

E-mail Support

Another thing we encounter quite often, are e-mails requesting technical support. Even though our contact page clearly mentions that these kind of requests need to be directed to the forum, people are sometimes ignorant and / or lazy… So whilst we always decline those requests (again – directing them to the forum instead), we’re not doing so because we want to be unhelpful; instead we’re just looking after our business. Here’s why we do things this way:

• Firstly, we need to make sure that only paying customers are getting support from us. This is done to be fair to our customers (as they paid for support) and also to safeguard the sustainability of our business.
• Secondly – if we had to answer every question via e-mail, that valuable information / solution would only be available to one person. If we answer it on the forum, we cut out publishing duplicate solutions, plus we make it available to all of our users, instead of just one person. This again increases the sustainability of our support function, as well as creating an extremely valuable (and extensive) knowledgebase.

Does that make a little more sense? Doesn’t seem like we’re monsters in any way, does it?

Fact is, as WooThemes is growing, we need to make sure that the business (and all of its processes) scales along with the growth in user numbers. If we don’t scale the business properly, you’ll begin to see a drop-off in quality, as well as quantity relating to new themes, answering support requests, new blog posts and even tweeting. So by getting the right boundaries in place, we’re just increasing the likelihood that we’ll scale properly…

(Note: This however doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to walk the extra mile for our customers!)

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.

I started out work mainly building websites for friends and for companies/organisations/clubs within the windsurfing world, so I’ve always been more interested in building ‘graphically’ more beautiful sites with lots of images, graphics and working with brighter colours as that fits the tempo for ‘sporting’ websites. Since my beginnings I’ve built websites for all sorts of businesses and individuals, but I guess my underlying passion still lives with sport related projects.

I have a manager who looks after my publicity/promotion/sponsorship needs whilst I’m in Europe, but I do all my promotion/media work myself when I’m in Australia. As a result, I’ve taken a keen interest in teaching myself the ropes of marketing, promotion, media correspondence and creating sponsorship proposals for my windsurfing. Now, with my webdesign work I feel I can pass on a lot of that knowledge to clients and somewhat advise them a little about branding and marketing through their websites – especially for athletes. Just recently I’ve built sites for an Australian Olympic sailor and an American Baseball player and also worked with them on some ideas on ways to create a ‘brand’ of themselves and how to promote/live through that brand on the internet.

Having recently started working with WooThemes, I find the scope of sites I am working on is vastly different to the simply ‘sporting’ ones I started out with, but this has also been an interesting and great added challenge to my work as a freelancer.

2. What is your favourite theme by WooThemes? And why?

I think right now it is Aperture, because I’m currently using it to revamp my windsurfing campaign website (www.AUS120.com). It got some really slick features but aside from that the layout is very square and symmetrical so it’s been really easy and efficient to completely cut it apart and revamp it!

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

The important thing it means to me is that I know what I’m getting myself in to every time I reply to a clients request for help. Originally, if a client approached me wanting to get a premium theme modified and I’d never used that theme before, I’d have to ‘guess’ what was possible within the framework of the theme and blindly get involved in to projects that sometimes were great, but other times were awful (like when you discover you basically have to re-write the entire code of a ‘premium’ theme that was written by an amateur coder!). All the Woo Themes are built on the same framework and generally speaking most of the Woo guys have similar styles of writing code, so when somebody comes to me with a request and I’ve never used that particular theme before, I know exactly what I am getting myself in to, and can give a more accurate quote in terms of price and the time it will take to complete.

The end result is basically I am probably charging the end-clients less than years previous, getting things done quicker because I am so used to the Woo coding and also able to finish more jobs in a shorter timeframe which is good for my hip-pocket

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

Starting working as a Woo Worker completely changed the way I’ve been working as a designer and also how I schedule my workload to fit in with my ‘other’ job; being a professional windsurfer. Previously, I’d been only building sites from scratch or doing heavy modifications of themes for clients. Each project may take 2-5 weeks and I always found myself up against deadlines and having to constantly spend time on the phone/Skype etc with the client rather than working at my own pace. Since starting as a Woo Worker I’ve noticed most people are coming to me wanting only small modifications (move this up here, or change this colour to here etc) or customising plugins they’ve downloaded (eg, forums like bbPress or Simple:Press) to fit in with their WooTheme colours. As a result, I can do 10 or so jobs a week rather than one big project for a month. So the end result is actually that I’m working with a lot more clients on smaller scale projects which is a lot less stressful but also allows me to fit in all the other millions of things I have to do each day.

The other cool thing with working with more people all the time is I’m constantly “meeting” new people (maybe just by email but sometimes by phone/Skype or in the “real” life version) and am having a lot more fun working – less stress mean I can get more done!

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

Of course. For a number of reasons. Firstly, you guys have much more themes than any Premium Theme company out there and have more people involved with the theme/support process which is important. I’ve done some work previously with other premium themes and the end result I always find is there is usually little to no support floating around after you purchase the theme. Sure, they have a forum or such, but its usually just the one designer replying to queries and often they’ll have a 5-6 day period between responses and the nature of the internet is that everyone wants everything IMMEDIATELY. So waiting 5 days for a support request is not an option for most people!

Another thing is actually having us Woo Workers. What a great idea! It gives us freelancers a great opportunity to be part of something big, but it also gives the customers an opportunity to get custom work done by designers experienced in the Woo code. I’m not sure any other theme company has this luxury, and I know the designers of premium themes get indundated with requests for custom modifications which I’m sure they can’t attend to all of, which in turn again frustrates the customers!

The final thing is the reassurance you have if you were to purchase a subscription. Do you really know if you signed up for 6 months whether another smaller company would still “exist” 6 months down the track and whether they’ll still be having the creative output to create new themes for all that time? We at least know with WooThemes, the creative juices won’t be running out as there’s a multitude of designers and also many upcoming and current collaborations with other designers for themes. We also know how passionate they are in their online work, with all of them blogging on their own personal sites and on other social media outlets; there’s a sense of pride that you can see that none of them would allow the quality of their work to drop – out of sheer embarrassment to themselves and the public that follow them online. That’s reassuring

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

The major case in point is that all the themes are built on the same framework, grid system and essentially all have similar features. Often I get clients asking about modifying a theme that I haven’t worked with before, but I can answer most of their questions before even looking at the code because I know what to expect with each theme. As I mentioned earlier, this means I usually end up charging less because there’s less time I spend trying to work through the code to make changes and I can get work done much quicker and look after more clients in a shorter period of time. Basically, case in point, with WooThemes, everything comes up Millhouse!

7. Anything else that you’d like to add? Maybe a little compliment or something?

One thing I’ve always been impressed with about WooThemes is their complete transparency. Nearly all the guys (Adii especially), blog or design or tweet on their own personal sites, independent of their Woo work which means you can actually see what these guys are up too in their spare time a little bit and outside of their Woo lives. There’s always a familiarity and ‘comfortable’ association you feel with companies where they are very transparent and open about their ideas and lives – and that familiarity leads customers to better trust and usually to better end sales results.

The reason I like this way of doing business so much is because I’ve grown up in a world of Professional Sports, where EVERYBODY on the tour is the enemy and you share no secrets about gear, training, lifestyle with anyone in case they copy your ideas and beat you on the racetrack. I’ve always felt that is a poor way to play sport as I’m interested in the grass-roots part of the sport as well as the professional side, and I find the non professional guys in the sport never learn how to get any better because none of the pros share any of their secrets. That’s the same in business I feel, the customer never understands why decisions are made that effect them, so the end result is they are usually more reluctant to give you their hard earned money.

I’ve always followed Adii’s adventures on his site because he’s always been the most transparent entrepreneur that I’ve come across on the internet. Reading his blog actually inspired me a few years back to start www.CarbonSugar.com, a website I’ve started to share ALL the secrets of pro-windsurfing, much to the horror of all my competitors! Haha.

Some recent WooTheme modifications by Sean…

• www.AUS120.com (Aperture)
• www.vmgblades.com (Aperture)
• www.CarbonSugar.com (GothamNews)
• www.design.aus120.com (Proudfolio)
• www.storm-riders.com.au (Fresh News)

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.

What is your favourite theme by WooThemes? And why?

That’s a hard one. It would have to be either Busy Bee or Over Easy.

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

Basically it means that I get more job offers than I previously did. I’ve found that my work load has tripled since becoming a AWW. As for what the job entails, it totally varies from job to job. 90% of the time it’s tweaking certain parts or creating custom widgets etc.

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

Although I occasionally work with other themes, I now use WooThemes for most of my freelance work. This has allowed me to work with the same basic framework which has increased productivity by reducing the overall time it takes to complete a customization, allowing me to take on more clients.

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

I’ve used a number of ‘Premium’ themes from various different designers, but unlike some of the other themes, WooThemes has the same basic framework and and consistency in all its themes which in my opinion makes it more attractive to me as I know I’ll be working with a theme that has a solid foundation.

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

From my point of view, I prefer getting my hands dirty in the actual code, although for new wordpress users and people who need a ready-to-go theme, I’ve been told by clients, that it’s one of the main reasons for purchasing a WooTheme.

Anything else that you’d like to add? Maybe a little compliment or something?

It’s more of complaint. Some of the themes are just to good and as a designer is becomes incredibly hard to come up with ideas to customize!

Some recent theme modifications by Kirstin

• http://www.watchtheguild.com
• http://www.triciahelferfan.com
• http://beta.iamchangingtheworld.org.za
• There more WooThemes customizations over at Flickr

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!

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.

Considering that you have changed the whole theme extensively, why did you buy a commercial theme, instead of developing your own theme from scratch?

Like everything in life time was against us. Our site as it was didn’t show the quality of work we produce and needed a complete re-design (quite frankly we were embarrassed to send future clients there.) So we took the old site down. From then onwards it was a rush to get a portfolio put together. This is where you guys stepped in. It seemed silly to waste precious time building a theme from scratch when we could get one that had all the major features we needed at the next to nothing cost of $70.00. Cheers guys, u saved us a lot of time.

Relating to your previous answer: what do you see as the main advantages & disadvantages of buying a commercial theme?

Like we said before, for us it was time; it saved us a lot! We were lucky there was a theme that had the structure and functionality we needed, it was plane sailing from their customizing it to our taste. I can’t really see any disadvantages of buying a commercial theme, it does what it says on the tin.

The ability to customize our themes extensively, is one of our main selling points. How did you find the process of modifying the theme?

As we already have a great understanding of WordPress the process of modifying the theme was a doddle, everything has been commented throughout and you can’t really go wrong. The support documents are excellent and very easy to follow.

Lastly, how do you feel about your experiences with the WooThemes community thus far? And what would you like to see us add / change in the future?

The support forum is a great asset, it seems a lot of people can get help and answers to their questions without much hassle – nice to see people helping each other.

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.

Considering that you guys are into design & development yourself, why did you decide to purchase a commercial theme, instead of developing one from scratch?

We went back and forth.  I’m not exactly an expert with WordPress and we also are so busy that developing our own custom sites takes forever.  The more we do web development jobs, we realize it’s not worth it to do it ALL yourselves.  It cut the time down immensely and I can focus on making a memorable website design, which is what I like to do.  I do know enough about WordPress to tweak and hack my way through to get what I want, and if not, I’ve got a few people I can ask.  So it seemed like the best option.  I had bookmarked about 10 different commercial themes, some more expensive, some cheaper.  But I went with Fresh News because it felt fit our needs the most.  It wasn’t “perfect” right out of the box, but it was damn close!

Relating to your previous answer: what do you see as the main advantages & disadvantages of buying a commercial theme?

The obvious disadvantage is that everyone else can make a similar site.  It’s a template, so other people are going to buy it as well.  If you can customize it to where it barely looks like the original, I think that’s a very good thing.  When you’re a company like us, it’s important to stand out from the crowd.  I was worried about that when I bought Fresh News.  But in the end, it can potentially be better for us because we can do Fresh News custom jobs for other people once they see what we’ve done with ours.  The main advantages are definitely the speed and ease of getting a working “pro” WordPress site without a whole lot of effort.

The ability to customize our themes extensively, is one of our main selling points. How did you find the process of modifying the theme?

It was fairly easy for me although I have a slightly advanced knowledge of HTML and CSS.  There were points where I was stuck and ready to give up, but I think that happens with just about every web job.  It was mostly all just a background image the overlayed PNG’s that make the theme really stand out.  It’s not too far off the original if you take away that.  I have since added some “sidebar widgets” to the footer because the original sidebar was getting too long.  That was something that wasn’t readily available in the original theme.

Lastly, what were your strategic aims with the new site and do you feel that the Fresh News theme has helped you achieve those?

We wanted to make it easier for readers to find our content and interact with our site.  Our pillar articles are our tutorials and guides/advice on running a design studio.  The old site was your typical blog site and it was hard for new visitors to even find those articles.  We wanted to take it up a level basically.  We also wanted to sell a little advertising, something our old site didn’t support.

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!

1) Steffan, you have used Live Wire on your personal blog. Why did you choose Live Wire and how have you found the theme thus far?

Livewire is a magazine-style theme so it might not seem like a good choice for a personal blog, but I loved the 3 column structure and the post style elements on the blog-style layout. With lifestreaming becoming the norm, I wanted to be able to pack a lot of different kinds of content on my home page, but to also make the layout easy to scan to maximize readability. I didn’t want my blog to be just about my posts – I wanted to bring many different elements like Twitter, my photos and various lifestreaming elements to the foreground, and make my posts a part of the mix.

Livewire’s blog layout and post excerpt/thumb styling is perfect for packing a lot of content on your home page, while giving the site a professional, clean look – very few “personal” blog themes have this dense magazine-type styling, so I just tweaked the theme and added a widgetized sidebar to get as much mileage as I could out of the center column to make it work for what I wanted.

So far, the theme’s been great and the new design has been very well received. The site’s been featured on WP-Premiums.com’s main page, as well as the Best-Of-August roundup, on Mark Forrester’s blog and a few other smaller design blogs. All-in-all, since the redesign, my daily traffic has more than tripled and my subscibers have doubled.

2) Considering the wealth of great free themes available, why did you decide to purchase a commercial theme instead?

The choice to go premium, in my opinion, is a no brainer, because you get on-going support from the designer (and from support forums). I can’t speak for other Premium theme designers, but the Woo Themes team has really taken a lot of time and energy to make their themes compatible with popular plugins and services like Flickr and Feedburner. It’s a real value add, especially for people like me who integrate a variety of webservices into my blog. Blogging isn’t just a self-contained activity anymore.

People who use unsupported themes learn the hard way that code isn’t static – it’s always changing – WordPress is constantly upgrading, web services are always changing and plugins aren’t always compatible with newer versions of WP. Just because everything’s working on your end today, doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way. Just the other day, Flickr changed something on their end and something went wrong with the Livewire theme that had been working fine for months and I started having some minor formatting issues in all browsers – I went to the support forum and people were already talking about it. By the time I even realized there was something wrong, Magnus already had a fix and an updated style sheet available for download. My site was back, looking great in 10 minutes and I didn’t have to worry about it. That’s what premium gets you – peace of mind.

Also, there’s a lot to be said for being able to upgrade to newer and newer versions of WordPress as the platform continues to expand rapidly with no real worry that your site is suddently going to go down. When you go premium, the designers do a lot of that coding and testing before you even have to worry about it.

Finally, having a back-end theme options panel was a huge draw for me – it saves me a ton of time and make WordPress work like a system. The less I have to get into the code, the better. That extra mile taken by Woo Themes to integrate a lot of the functionality into thier admin panels is a huge value-add for me as a blogger – easy feedburner integration, flickr, video, ads, number of posts per page, layout, styling…it’s all there. Love it!

3) Do you have any web development / design skills? How would you rate those skills?

I’ve been coding HTML and CSS for years and I’m a photoshop semi-pro, but I left the design world about 5 years ago for a different career. Since then, I’m largely self taught so there are a lot of gaps in my knowledge with PHP, but I get by and just do it for fun now. By today’s standards, on an amateur to rockstar designer scale, I’m smack in the middle when it comes to coding and closer to the professional end when it comes to adobe’s design suite.

4) How did you find the theme from a customisation point of view?

It wasn’t that tough, but I had to hack at it a little (don’t we all?). The structure is logical and obvious to someone who’s used to web development and coding, but I wouldn’t recommend a novice attempt to make major structural changes. It would get messy fast.

The CSS however is gorgeous – it’s logical, commented well, and easy to follow and edit – just how coding should be.

5) Anything you’d like to add for existing & prospective WooThemes users?

I want to see other lifestreaming elements be brought into the WooThemes portfolio. Progressive personal blogs are doing a lot more integration with third party services. Blogging is becoming less about posting long thoughtful articles, and more about mixing long posts with microblogging and lifestreaming. I think you’d see a lot of personal bloggers invest in themes that offer built in life streaming elements (stylized twitter streams etc).

I’d also like to see integration with popular commenting services like Disqus and Intense Debate. I still havent gotten this to work on my site, but both commenting services are SO much better than WP functionality ever could be.