Whilst design is ultimately subjective, one thing that can’t be disputed is the fact that our designer focus has probably contributed significantly to our success. This seems to be confirmed by startup guru, Dave McClure, in a recent BusinessWeek article about the value of design to startups:

“Design and marketing aren’t just as important as engineering: They are way more important.”

So in a very techy industry (the interwebs), there seems to be a lot of room for the more design-orientated folk among us. In the past, you could probably get by if you had a superior & groundbreaking product, but these days your competition is much tougher and you need to fight for every person that gives you their attention (superb design tends to be successful in this regard).

In a recent comparison of microblogging giants, Tumblr & Posterous, the author says (about Tumblr’s popularity):

“Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.”

Two posts on the topic and both seems to indicate that a superb design has become a competitive advantage, which may just differentiate you from your competitors (and ultimately bring you success, instead of putting that on their doorstep).

Design.

By now you can guess where we’re going with this: don’t underestimate the value that design can bring to your startup or just any project in general.

Superb design work is admittedly quite expensive, but a mediocre design, user experience & marketing campaign just won’t cut it anymore. If you haven’t been giving this enough thought & energy until now, you need to implement a more design-focused approach in your thinking & strategizing.

We’re just one of the success stories in terms of companies that has been successful with this approach and whilst I don’t think that you can’t be successful without such an approach; I do think you’re giving yourself a massive head start. Bonus for me is the fact that others seem to be convinced that you can design your way to the top.

See, when Mark, Magnus & I started WooThemes we had limited experience & knowledge in running a business, and much less in establishing new online brand. To say that we’ve had to learn on the job would thus be a gross understatement; beyond knowing how to design & code, we really don’t *know* much more.

That is why I started off by saying that what you see in front of you today, is a company & brand that has undergone continuous tweaks & changes in the last 2-odd years and the only reason we’ve managed to pull it off is because we have never been fearful of taking a few risks and investing heavily in our ideas, vision & ambitions. Had we however allowed that “fear” to consume us, things may have been a little different… Let me explain…

As an example, I’d like to point to our existing backend system: when we first launched WooThemes, we realized that it had some glaringly obvious limitations and whilst the launch of WOO2 last year went a long way in addressing some of those limitations, we still don’t have a perfect system. Consider the odd login & billing imperfections / glitches in our system and it is clear that we’re a long way off from offering our users a perfect environment. But that’s not the point…

What we could’ve done in the past, was to develop a perfect system from the get-go, which would’ve eliminated those issues now. This would have been a lengthy and costly exercise though, and something that is always easier to say in hindsight. Instead, we opted to embrace the limitations & imperfections of our backend system (and our business as a whole) and just evolve everything as we go. Getting what we want to offer you, to you quicker.

The point that I want to bring across though, is that even considering all of this, we’ve still been able to build a business that is both profitable and becoming more sustainable as time goes on. Irrespective of the lack of experience, knowledge & the massive budget most people think is needed to create a new business, we’ve created something against most odds; the only barrier to entry would’ve thus been the limitations that we set ourselves in our minds.

Don’t be afraid to evolve your ideas and build from an imperfect foundation. There are always ways to rectify those imperfections in the future, and being conscious of those imperfections shouldn’t deter you from gunning for your vision & ambition with utter passion & motivation.

So it’s great when we get to see, that we’ve influenced people’s perception of “Woo”; but not just the way we use it – but the word as a whole. Last night on TechCrunch, they covered a new startup called WooRank, in the comments on that post some people believed that we were behind this new startup. Pretty neat, hey?

Now this post isn’t intended to gloat, but I’d like to point out two reasons why I think we’ve had this success in “owning” the “Woo” enterprise online (if not completely, we have a massive share of the “woo” market…).

WooEverything

I don’t know whether you have noticed, but we try to use the word “Woo” in as many ways as possible in our every day activities. Since WooThemes is essentially a CamelCase word, we like to combine other words in a similar way i.e. WooTeam, instead of WooThemes Team. Similarly, we have Affiliated Woo Workers, which reinforces the “Woo” branding again.

We don’t do this to be redundant, but we do sprinkle a good few “Woo”’s in there to reinforce our brand and make sure that it is consistent throughout most of our marketing campaigns & user interactions.

The Ninja

Another one of these elements that I think have become synonymous with our brand is the inclusion of the WooNinja (see what I did there?) as much as possible; in most cases, we’ll find a way to include the ninja and work our branding / marketing around that.

The WooNinja is at least somewhat of a novel idea and I think the way we’ve used it – and how we have made it part of our core branding – appeals to our existing & prospective users. The most important thing about the ninja’s inclusion though, is that our visual branding also stays consistent, which means that the brand as a whole can grow on people much easier (consider that people are naturally averse to regular change).

Take Away

Whilst it’s not gonna help you to “Woo” your own brand with ninja icons, consider the two points that I’ve mentioned above to build your own brand.

Proper branding is about creating a consistent, trustworthy, accessible & fun brand that will appeal to your customers and non-customers alike. And if it helps to include a little mascot to achieve that goal, then you should seriously consider doing so.

What we’ve found though is that irrespective of implementing specific strategies; it has been our persistence that has paid the biggest dividends in our growth over the last 12 – 18 months.

So what is this persistence that I’m referring to? Well, basically it’s just deciding on a plan / strategy and then sticking to your guns in executing those decisions – even if you can’t necessarily immediately see the effects of those plans. Here’s a few reasons why persistence pays off…

1. Persistence leads to improvement. By continuously working away at your ideas and building your business, The natural result of this is the fact that you’ll get better at what you’re doing, which means your products / services will improve. It also goes without saying that improved products / services are much easier to take to market…

2. People love companies that work hard. I think people actually notice a strong work ethic and in this regard, they will recognize one’s persistence. This obviously also bodes well for after-sales service, which is becoming much more important than the initial product / service that the customer purchased.

3. People like to be reminded of awesomeness. The conversation with your customers should never come to an end, as people ultimately love to be kept up to date, and essentially stay in touch with what their favourite businesses are cooking up. If you’re not gonna tell them; nobody is.

4. Staying Visual. You need to make sure that your business and marketing efforts are constantly in front of the eyes of existing & prospective customers. The more visual and accessible your brand / business is; the more likely those customers will be spending money with you.

This has most definitely worked for us and we’ll continue to tweak our approaches, try some new strategies, but ultimately stay as persistent in our execution & implementation of these. This is the only way we know how to market WooThemes and from our success and growth, we’d probably be mad to change any of that just yet…

What’s your take on this though? Do you find our persistence to be a vital cog (as this post suggests) in our marketing machine? Have you seen other companies implementing a similar approach?

We still needed to keep up to date with what the team was working on at any given stage though. So Prologue2 was our solution. (Preferred over Yammer or Campfire, because it’s awesome and it’s free.)

Before I tell you how we’re using P2, here’s some extracts from Matt Mullenweg’s blog post on the matter:

We found a solution in Prologue which added a posting box to the home page and gave it a Twitter-like feel. Now Automattic had a pulse, a place where the incredible amount of activity was chronicled and captured. It was low-friction and hassle-free, we all started using it more.

It completely transformed how Automattic works internally and I think is one of the most valuable things we’ve adopted in the past year.

Suffice to say, I think the whole WooTeam would agree with me when I say that P2 has changed the way we communicate as well. We currently average almost 30 updates (or comments) / weekday since we started using P2 and those updates generally relate to what we’re doing at that moment, sharing a link or asking a question. And all of this in real-time.

Here’s how it’s changed our communications:

• Less e-mail which is CC’ed to the whole team;
• Less Skype conversations (and talking rubbish);
• We’re more up-to-date with what everyone on the team is doing;
• P2’s mobile-friendly version, means we stay up to date wherever we are; and
• We still have a record of all communications.

Are you using a similar application / system to stay updated? Or still haven’t made the switch from e-mail / IM? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter…

Fore more information on the web apps we use at WooThemes: Better Startup (Part 3): The 15 Web Apps that powers WooThemes

The one thing that we’ve always been pretty adamant about though (with regards to the freebies we release), is that the quality of those freebies needs to be right up there. so the free themes that we have released are all top-notch themes and they include all of the functionality that our paid themes would.

Why? We want to impress you guys enough to consider signing up / purchasing the real deal, instead of just using the freebies.

And therein probably lies the art & science of releasing a freebie; you need to actually release something that is representative of your business’ excellent services & products. If your freebies look like half-assed hack jobs, then that’s going to reflect badly on your business and it’s definitely not gonna convert the freebies users to paying customers. I also think that online peeps actually see through low-quality freebies which are simply released for traffic; people simply expect better.

So to sum up this “science” of the freebie, here’s a checklist you should consider before releasing your new freebie out into the wild…

• Why are you releasing the freebie? Are you doing it just for the traffic?
• What is the quality like? Is it in line with your products & services?
• Does releasing the freebie enhance your brand & its reputation?
• Does the freebie actually matter? Will your existing & potential new users actually find value in the freebie?

We’d love to hear what you think about this… Want to rant about low quality, hack job freebies? Feel free… And if you wanted to give us feedback on any of the WooThemes freebies and your opinions on their quality that would be appreciated too.

And we believe we’ve been relatively successful, considering that our unique visitors are up 16% and pageviews, 25% from June to July. Also, if you look at the following two traffic graphs, you’ll see that the incoming traffic line is a lot flatter in July compared to June. Weekends will obviously be more quiet, but the aim is to even get visitors to your site then…

June traffic showing considerable decreases in traffic over weekends

The traffic graph for July shows a much more consistent, "flatter" line

*Yellow lines above shows the days on which we published new content.

In June, traffic on the weekend dropped about 22% (per day) in comparison to the average weekday, whilst we managed to decrease that to about 14% in July. That means we’ve already gotten a 36% improvement in just one month! Here’s how we did it…

1. Publish regular content

Seems like a silly thing to say, but most people ignore this. We’ve tried to publish content regularly during the week and then at least once over a weekend. Also – instead of publishing 2 / 3 posts on one day, we’re spacing that out to different times during the week, which means that the site is getting more clicks & pageviews on an increased amount of days.

2. Publish often

This may also seem kinda obvious, but the more fresh content you add to your site, the better your chance to improve your traffic stats. In July we published 18 new posts on the WooThemes blog, compared to the 15 in June. So whilst not a massive difference, the 3 extra posts definitely brought in additional traffic and pageviews.

3. Engage your readers

Here the aim is to ensure the reader actually comes back to the same post a few times, because they’ve left a comment and want to continue to conversation. Looking at comments on WooThemes, we managed to go from 378 comments in June to a whopping 669 in July. So assuming that increased conversation is directly related to increased pageviews, engaging content is a definite if you’re keen on getting a steady influx of traffic.

4. Be interactive

We’ve found that posts with voting polls or another element of user feedback works great, because you are involving the reader and in this way they have a kind of “stake” in the outcome of that post (meaning they might come back to check up on progress or an end-result).

5. Split posts into 2 (or more) parts

Another way of ensuring multiple pageviews from the same user, is to split posts into more than one part. Not only does this add value (since the content is more), but when the first part is very good, you’ve sold the user and you’re assured of getting that second click on the next part in the series.

This is a good recent example: We show you teasers – Part 1 & Part 2.

6. Contests & freebies

Nothing beats free stuff and it definitely has a very positive contribution to a site’s traffic. One of our recent competitions (it had two parts as well) really upped the traffic on the blog last week, whilst the icons freebie on WooCamp has gotten almost 4500 unique visitors to date.

7. Publish at appropriate times

Check where the majority of your web traffic is coming from and publish posts during work hours in those countries, not in the middle of the night, since your content then gets lost on Twitter (i.e. most people don’t check past tweets the next day). Alternatively, tweet about your content twice during different times of the day, so that all your potential users will see the tweet / link.

8. Interlinking

We’ll finish off with another rudimentary tip, but one that is often neglected. I think we’ve managed to use quite an efficient strategy now, whereby we link to content on the WooThemes blog from WooCamp and vice-versa (this would’ve been evident from above as well). You’re not also pushing your content to the reader in this way, but you’re actually providing contextual, additional value to the reader.

We’d love for you to try these out on your own websites sometime; whilst we won’t make any concrete promises, we can assure you that if these tips are executed properly, you’ll definitely see an increase in your traffic. We’d also love to hear from you with regards to ideas on how we could take this up another notch!

The Website

WordPress (Link)

WordPress

We’d be hypocrites if we didn’t use WP to power our main website, right? Basically when we set out to design & develop the WooThemes website last year, we only knew how to use WordPress, so we never really considered any alternatives. But looking back over a very successful year (and massive growth), I think that WooThemes is evidence that you can build a very efficient business (website) on WP. It’s definitely not just a publishing platform…

bbPress (Link)

bbPress

We use bbPress to power our support forums on WooThemes and whilst it is most definitely not the best or most mature forum / discussion board platform out there, it plugs into our WP setup beautifully. Also, along with the “Support plugin” for bbPress, the forum functions completely like a support ticketing system.

aMember (Link)

aMember

aMember is responsible for the magic that happens behind the scenes. aMember too plugs into our WP + bbPress setup and is responsible for the user management bits on WooThemes. So the user dashboard, downloading of themes, affiliate program and buying / checkout procedures are all controlled by aMember. We also use 2Checkout.com as our payment processor, which integrates into aMember to include the transactional functionality.

Feedburner (Link)

Feedburner

I have a tendency of thinking that RSS’ days are over, since it’s so much easier getting information from Twitter (then again, it’s all information overload anyway)… But we still use Feedburner religiously in tracking the amount of subscribers on our RSS feeds and up until now, there is no real alternative to Feedburner. If you’re into your stats then, Feedburner is a kinda non-negotiable element within your arsenal.

Pingdom (Link)

Pingdom

Beyond being online 24 / 7 and refreshing the WooThemes website every 30 seconds (to check whether it’s gone down), there’s not much you can do to ensure 100% uptime of a website (which is very important for us, as we’re actually selling something). So we use Pingdom to notify us via SMS & e-mail instantaneously if everything weird is up with the server. The SMS functionality is nice, as it then allows us just to send a quick mail to our web support guys; most of the time from our iPhones…

Communication & Project Management

Gmail (Link)

Gmail

Considering that we’re very much a virtual company, our whole team needs to have access to the WooThemes e-mail accounts, so that we can basically cover for each other should Magnus go fishing in Alaska for a week and a half (for example hehe). We’ve tried other mailroom applications in the past, but found that Gmail is the easiest and most efficient in terms of dealing with the bucketloads of mail we get on a daily basis.

Basecamp (Link)

Basecamp

Basecamp is probably the cornerstone on which we build all of our planning & communications. Whilst we probably don’t use Basecamp as much as we should, all of our most important decisions, to-do’s, ideas and data is on our Basecamp profile. The nice thing about Basecamp is that it’s always there, without getting in our way or forcing us to use it instead of e-mail / Skype.

Prologue 2 (Link)

P2

This is something new that we’ve been experimenting with in the last couple of weeks… We use P2 as an internal Twitter of sorts, where we get to keep each other updated on what we’re doing in a more real-time way. Since we don’t work from the same office all the day, it’s important for us to know what’s happening during the day. We’re definitely still figuring out how to get the best value from P2, but initial signs are promising in terms of increasing our productivity.

Marketing

Twitter (Link)

Twitter

We’ve slowly been building the WooThemes presence on Twitter and whilst we don’t have a set strategy in terms of how / when we use Twitter, we find the most value from using it to broadcast our news, as well as add some interaction between ourselves and those interested in interacted with us (albeit customers, users of our free themes or just any Average Joe).

CoTweet (Link)

CoTweet

In addition to Twitter, we’ve started to use CoTweet to allow the whole WooTeam to monitor our Twitter account for @replies & DM’s. And the initial thoughts on CoTweet is that it’s an extremely sexy web app that does what it promises extremely well.

Peashootapp (Link)

Peashootapp

Peashoot is another of those apps that we’ve only recently started using, but we’re really enjoying the experience whilst figuring out exactly where the benefit of using the service is. We’re currently using it to track (especially) our Twitter marketing campaigns (in terms of clicks on links and re-tweets). We’ve also added our custom domain (woourl.com) for URL shortening, which allows us to use Peashoot (along with our affiliate program) to track conversions on our paid advertising (on other sites) much more accurately. Even though we’re thus still finding our feet with Peashoot, it’s definitely worth the $25 / month!

Campaign Monitor (Link)

Campaign Monitor

We’ve been using Campaign Monitor since the Premium News Themes days and haven’t looked back once. Our monthly e-mail newsletters are sent out with Campaign Monitor and beyond the ease-of-use (in terms of managing our subscriber lists & sending out new newsletters), we absolutely love the bundled analytics that we get after each newsletter. In addition, this is the newsletter software (??) for designers, so why wouldn’t we use it?

Development

Beanstalk (Link)

Beanstalk

I’ve mentioned this on multiple posts that I’ve written before, but using SVN has completely changed the way we develop our themes. In fact, it’s changed the process so much that I’d never be able to work without SVN again. So Beanstalk is just our hosted SVN repository, where all of our themes are housed. Benefits of going hosted compared to self-hosted? I dunno… We never explored that option, but having it hosted makes the admin side of things so much easier.

Lighthouse (Link)

Lighthouse

Whilst we use bbPress for a public support forum / ticketing system, we use Lighthouse to track all of the reported bugs, which needs to be fixed in themes. Along with the bugs, we also have a separate list of potential new features which we review regularly in terms of deciding which will make it into the packaged themes. Since we’ve started using Lighthouse, I believe we’ve missed very few bugs and it’s also sped up our bug fixing / updating processes. We probably also need to integrate this into our Basecamp profile sometime…

Other

Vimeo (Link)

Vimeo

You may ask why not YouTube? Well, no other video service is as cool and fun to use as Vimeo. We don’t use Vimeo too often at the moment, but all of our promo, tutorial & support videos are housed on our Vimeo account. We’ve found Vimeo to be quite fast and it does exactly what we need it to do. So nothing special to rave about; instead it just allows us to focus on creating the content and then effortlessly publishing it online.

And that’s the list… Don’t think we’ve left anything out, but if we did, then it’s probably because it’s not *that* important to us. So ask us any questions about why / how we use these apps / services listed above and maybe also share some of the things that you’ve found useful in running your businesses / projects.ww

Twitter has grown so fast recently, that it’s transformed itself into a very fine line between signal & noise. So finding value from Twitter isn’t always the easiest thing; especially if you’re not following the right people. The irony in that is, that sometimes the most popular / widely followed Twitter users don’t provide much value at all and the only reason for their popularity is the “rich gets richer” principle.

We have thus compiled a list of 45 Twitter users which we recommend you follow if you’re interested in WordPress. The list includes members of the WordPress team, bloggers who publish great WP content or the guys and girls that design and develop some of the best WordPress themes & plugins out there.

So if you’re not following these people just yet, get clicking and follow them right away…

The WordPress Team

WordPress (@wordpress)

Okay, so the first one is kinda obvious, but it’s really a no-brainer, ain’t it? This is the official WordPress Twitter account, where you can follow the latest news & happenings with the core project.

Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt)

Matt is the founder of that platform we all seem to love – WordPress – and is thus the original WordPress Rockstar. Under Matt’s guidance WordPress has grown from humble beginnings to (probably) the most popular CMS on the web today.

Matt doesn’t tweet that often, but it would be a shame if you’re interested in WordPress and you’re not following the founder thereof.

Toni Schneider (@tonidotorg)

Toni is the CEO of Automattic, the company responsible for the commercial interests of WordPress and their related projects. Along with Matt, they’ve formed an incredible team which has managed WP’s awesome growth with semi-perfection. Another he shares with Matt, is the lack of tweets… But we’re sure it’ll come…

Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith)

Lead developer of WordPress and a freelance WordPress consultant. Mark has also released quite a wide variety of great WP plugins and is probably one of the more prominent WP lead developers (in terms of blogging & community interaction).

Peter Westwood (@westi)

Another of WP’s lead developers. Peter is relatively active on Twitter and his WordPress blog is regularly updated with great WP-related news.

Andy Peatling (@apeatling)

Lead Developer of the BuddyPress project, which is a social-network (ala Facebook) platform build on the multi-user version of WordPress. Expect big things from both Andy & BuddyPress in future.

Donncha O’Caoimh (@donncha)

Contributing developer on the core WordPress project and also responsible for the hugely popular WP Super Cache plugin. He’s also Irish, sometimes funny and supremely knowledgeable when it comes to WordPress / coding. So why wouldn’t you follow him?

Theme Developers & Designers

R Bhavesh (@rbhavesh)

Bhavesh is the founder, designer & developer of PremiumThemes.net, where he has released quite a few free & paid WordPress themes already.

Lester Chan (@gamerz)

Lester has written some of the most widely used WP plugins available and I’d bet that you have at least one of his plugins installed on your blog. And this guys certainly knows his way around WP, judging by those plugins…

Pavel Ciorici (@ciorici)

Pavel originally started WPZoom as a value-adding community blog, but has recently started releasing some WP themes on there. Definitely worth checking out!

Joost de Valk (@yoast)

Similar to Lester, Joost has got to be one of the “plugin greats” within the WP community. In addition to his WP plugin development skills, he also helps Brian Gardner out over at StudioPress and is amazing at doing SEO.

Ptah Dunbar (@ptahdunbar)

In Ptah’s own words, he’s a WordPress hacker. He’s currently working on his own theme framework called WPFramework.

Elegant Themes (@elegantthemes)

Elegant Themes make some of the absolute best WP themes available at the moment and if you’re keen to get your hands on some of these beauties, then we suggest you follow these guys.

Brian Gardner (@bgardner)

Brian is the founder of StudioPress and probably also the “founder” of the premium themes model within the WP community. His original Revolution theme sparked a lot of innovation within the WP community and you can still see its influence in some themes today.

Mayank Gupta (@mayank)

Mayank runs a blog design service which mainly designs blog themes for WordPress based blogs. He is fortunate enough to have some of the prominent bloggers of all times as his clients (Daniel Scocco, Yaro Starak, Gobala, Liz Strauss etc.).

Darren Hoyt (@darrenhoyt)

Darren is the designer / developer responsible for the hugely popular Mimbo & Mimbo Pro themes. He has also recently launched WPTopics – an aggregator of all the best WP-related content on the web.

Ryan Imel (@ryanimel)

Ryan runs the popular blog, ThemePlayground, where he covers WP news, along with the odd tutorial / how-to. He’s also released a few themes which we’d recommend you have a look at some time…

Jean Baptiste Jung (@catswhocode)

We absolute love what Jean has done with WPRecipes. The blog is just incredible in terms of the value of their in-depth and content-rich tutorials. If you want to learn some new WordPress stuff, follow the cats who code.

Alex King (@alexkingorg)

Alex is probably the first WP developer I ever followed and his plugins has made him a very prominent member in the developers community. He (and his team) is currently working on a theme framework called Carrington, which is getting rave reviews all round.

Cory Miller (@corymiller303)

Cory is the brains behind iThemes, where he & his team releases free & paid WordPress themes.

Dan Milward (@danmilward)

Ever heard of WP-Commerce? Well, Dan is the developer behind this amazing plugin, which can turn your WP blog into a fully-fledged eCommerce site in a few minutes.

Simon North (@simnor)

Simon is a talented designer & WordPress developer. He has also recently joined the WooThemes support team and we can attest to the fact that he knows his WordPress; just ask our users…

Chris Pearson (@pearsonified)

If you haven’t heard of Chris and Thesis, then you’re not following the WP community. Chris is the sole developer on Thesis, a premium theme framework, which has been making waves within the theming community. If you’re into theme frameworks, Thesis is probably right up there amongst the best-of-the-best.

David Perel (@obox)

David is one of the co-founders at Obox Design, where they recently released some commercial WP themes. He’s an incredibly talented designer and you’d also have heard of David via the very popular From The Couch vidcast.

Marc Perel (@MarcPerel)

Marc is the brother of David and co-founder of Obox Design. He may be relatively new to the world of WordPress, but he’s an amazing developer and will soon start making a name for himself within the WP community.

Nathan Rice (@nathanrice)

Nathan – who helps release some themes over at iThemes – has got to be one of the most genuine guys in the WP theming community. Never afraid to help someone out, he’s also been plotting with the recent development of his theme framework – Prodigy.

Lisa Sabin-Wilson (@LisaSabinWilson)

We’d guess that the author of “WordPress for Dummies” knows their way around WP, right? Well, Lisa is not only a pretty lady, but she sure as hell knows her WP and is a talented designer at that.

Jason Schuller (@jschuller)

Out of all of WooThemes’ “competitors”, we regularly sit back and enjoy the awesomeness of Jason’s work. Jason releases his themes over at Press75 and the fact that he doesn’t support IE6 (at all!) makes him so much cooler.

Ian Stewart (@iandstewart)

ThemeShaper is probably one of the beacons within the WP community and Ian has done a lot in terms of creating awesome WP content. In addition to ThemeShaper, Ian has also developed (probably) the most popular themes framework to date – Thematic.

Collis Ta’eed (@collis)

Okay, maybe Collis isn’t a WordPress developer / designer entirely… But he is responsible for giving us ThemeForest, where they regularly release top-notch WP themes.

Justin Tadlock (@justintadlock)

Similar to Ian Stewart, Justin is another of those great people that has contributed so much of their time & effort back into the WP community. He is also responsible for the theme framework, Hybrid.

ThemeForest (@ThemeForest)

We mentioned this when we introduced Collis, but here’s ThemeForest’s official Twitter account, if you wanted to stay up-to-date with their latest theme releases.

Chris Wallace (@chriswallace)

Chris is a really great designer, who has released a handful of very cool WordPress themes. Our favourite is probably Gallery, which he built on top of the Thematic framework.

WPEngineer (@wpengineer)

Run by three WordPress lovers, this is a great Twitter stream and blog to follow for some amazing WordPress tips & tricks.

General WordPress

Jeff Chandler (@jeffr0)

Jeff is the voice behind the WPWeekly podcast and also WPTavern, which is a popular WordPress community website.

Mark Ghosh (@laughinglizard)

Mark started the very popular WP blog – WeblogToolsCollection – where he still produces awesome WP-related content on a regular basis. Another one of those beacons in the WP community.

Lorelle van Fossen (@lorelleonwp)

Lorelle has been participating in the WordPress project since the very beginning (or so it seems) and she is most definitely one of the legends of the community.

WPCandy (@wpcandy)

These guys produce awesome content if they just get around to it…

WPHacks (@HackWordPress)

Run by Kyle Eslick, WPHacks covers a wide variety of WP-related topics.

WPTavern (@wptavern)

Twitter account for the very active and popular WP community run by Jeff Chandler.

The WooThemes Team

WooThemes (@woothemes)

This is the official Twitter account for WooThemes, which is generally used for marketing, connecting with some of the Woo users and responding to the odd support question. Follow this account for all the latest WooThemes-related news.

Adii (@adii)

Adii is a co-founder over at WooThemes and is generally responsible for the management & strategy of the business at WooThemes. He regards himself more as an entrepreneur, but you’ll also find him designing / developing the odd WordPress theme.

Magnus Jepson (@mjepson)

Magnus is co-founder at WooThemes and also the king of the development & support of all the themes. He’s been “lovingly” given the nickname Magatron as a result of his robot-like work ethic and strict support principles.

Mark Forrester (@mark_forrester)

Mark is the third co-founder in WooThemes and is in charge of all the design processes for new themes, as well as theme documentation and screencasts. And do yourself a favour once and find Mark’s video for The Journal’s theme release, as it includes some nice, cheesy (porno) background music.

Cobus Bester (@FRESH01)

Cobus (or FRESH01 as most know him) only joined the WooTeam in March of this year, but has added immense value – as a young, extremely talented designer – since then. This is definitely a designer to watch for the future!

Foxinni (@foxinni)

Foxinni – just like Cobus – only joined the WooTeam in March, but has since then been responsible for a coding revolution amongst the Woo ranks. The new WooFramework is totally been Fox’s brainchild and is entirely fueled by his massive appetite to become the best web developer in the world. ]]> http://www.woothemes.com/2009/07/45-wordpress-people-you-need-to-follow/feed/ 34