The WooThemes Blog

We recently hosted a little survey within the WooCommunity (members only) to figure out just how we could further improve WooThemes for our users. We got more than 3000 responses on the survey and we’ve already started to put some new decisions in place based on your feedback.

To say thanks, we also promised to give away 4 x 16GB iPad 2′s to some lucky winners. Jeff got the the honour to pick 4 random numbers which we then matched with the respondent list. Here’s the 4 winners:

• Nick Kask
• Bob Dunn
• Frank Groet
• Phil Greenwood

Congrats to these winners and thanks to everyone else that helped us out by taking the survey. For those that weren’t so lucky to have won a shiny, new iPad, your reward will be in all the awesome stuff we release in the next couple of months.

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

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

Inspiration In Three Forms

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

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

Blegh, too much blogging if you ask me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. First Times

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

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

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

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

Introducing Woo in Blighty

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

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The WooCommunity has been growing from strength to strength these last few months and we’re excited about the dynamism and activity that is being generated from within. We’re keen to further fuel this activity and step up the value that is being created by members of the WooCommunity.

Our first initiative is to start publishing more tutorials and we’re hoping that some of those will be submitted by WooUsers. Last week we ran a poll on our Facebook page asking for input on the things we’re supposed to be blogging about and tutorials (both WP-related and design-related) came out on top.

Since you are the guys & girls using our themes the most, we figured that you’re in a great position to share what you’re doing with our themes. This is the type of content we’re looking for…

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At the end of last month, we mentioned the possibility of having a little London meetup on our upcoming trip to the UK. And now we can confirm that this is indeed happening…

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

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

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Last week we explained that we were in the process of streamlining & improving a couple of things in & around WooThemes. This is the second part to that initial post and we suggest that you read that post first, since it provides some much-needed context.

The second significant area which we’re targeting with a couple of tweaks is our development & release cycles. Our products have two main pillars, which are of course the design & development thereof, along with providing the support for those products. It thus goes without saying that we’re aiming to strengthen these two pillars drastically in the coming months.

Before we launch into our goals for the next couple of weeks, we wanted to explain why we feel it is necessary to tweak things slightly. Lately we’ve been noticing that: 1) we don’t necessarily release new stuff as quickly as we’d like; 2) we’re always being challenged to prioritize new stuff versus the maintenance & upgrading of existing stuff; and 3) it sometimes takes weeks to find a gap in our schedule to work on more advanced / niche / experimental things.

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The exciting news is that the whole WooTeam will be in the UK (London & Newcastle to be precise) in early June, where we’ll meet up, spend some time chilling and amongst other things, attend DIBI. The most exciting part of this is, that this will be the first time in our 3-odd years of existence that the whole WooTeam (all 10 of us!) will be able to share a couple of beers together. Fun times ahead indeed.

So we were thinking about extending these fun times to the UK-based members of the WooCommunity that perhaps wanted to share an evening of beers, WordPress & Woo with all of us… The basic idea would be to organize a little venue for a get-together on one of the evenings that we are in London and then we’d open it up to anyone that wanted to hang with us, have a couple of beers and talk WP & Woo for a couple of hours.

What do you think? If you’re in London (or the rest of the UK if you’re willing to travel a little further), would you be interested in a little get-together like this?

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A culmination of quite a few things that has happened in & around WooThemes in the last couple of months, has seen us trying to take a step back from all the huffing & puffing and just take stock of where we are at as a company and a team. Across all of the spheres of our business, we’ve come to one conclusion: we’ve grown much faster than expected and our internal systems hasn’t been grown at the same pace.

So what we’ve done is to do internal “audits” of our various activities trying to identify any gaps or inefficiencies, along with tweaks & improvements that could result in us being a better WooThemes. From these audits and extensive internal discussions, we’ve made a wide variety of decisions which will be implemented in the next couple of weeks.

Since these decisions directly affects the WooCommunity, we wanted to be as transparent as possible with our goals & aims during this process. As a team we’d like the WooCommunity to hold us accountable and keep us on our toes, so in this 2-part post, we’re hoping to share our goals with you.

Here’s what we had in mind for support…

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We were acknowledged in a Detailed Comparison of Premium WordPress Theme Clubs, which was published over at Smashing Magazine. For the WooUsers that haven’t seen this report yet, we wanted to re-iterate a couple of things that caught our attention:

• We have the biggest collection of themes (paid & free) available, whilst we’re also averaging 2 new theme releases per month in the last 6 months.
• Our minimum cost per theme (that’s if you are simply subscribed to the club for one month) is only $2.60 per theme. Whack to think the kind of quality you’re getting at that price…
• In straight monetary terms, an annual subscription with us is expensive, but more than justified when considering the oodles of awesomeness you’re buying into.

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As co-founders of a healthy growing company, there are many things that we could be proud of, but recently there’s been one thing that is really standing out in terms of the significance of the warm fuzzies that it produces.

Jeep is using Busy Bee for their official blog

In recent months, we’ve been seeing more & more big brands using our themes (like Jeep above or Ford pictured below). Obviously we’re ecstatic to have 45k+ users using our themes, but somehow knowing that our products are also becoming the choice of the elite & A-list is gratifying on a whole new level. I mean – wouldn’t that stroke your ego too?

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It’s that time of the month again, where we’d like to follow-up with what we started last month and highlight some of the ideas (which you have submitted via WooIdeas) that we’re most intrigued about.

Here’s some ideas that are definitely on our radar and probably just needs a bit more love & voting from you before it makes it onto our various to do lists…

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