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.

Designers like Firman Daus & Armono Wibowo have made a big impact with their submissions, whilst we’re also excited to preview a new, unseen design by the talented youngster, Ajmal Eylia. There is however one name that shoots to prominence when thinking about young, unknown designers that have made their debut on WooThemes: Izuddin Helmi.

We recently had a chat with Izuddin – who has designed 7 themes for us (including my.stream, which is yet to be released) about his involvement with us to try determine how that might have influenced his design work / career.

One of the first things that Izuddin will tell you is that he has had no formal design training, but he believes he’s got a natural eye for design. He also noted that through his collaborations with WooThemes he has developed immensely as a designer and that Magnus is one of his all-time, favourite designers.

Quizzed on how his WooThemes work has influenced his career thus far, Izuddin simply said:

“I’m very grateful and happy that enquiries about my freelance work have increased 10 times ever since I started designing for WooThemes. Thanks guys!”

We’d also like to believe that we had a major influence on Izuddin’s new business venture, where the experience he gained from working with us, is proving to be very helpful.

So where are we going with all of this?

Designing For WooThemes

We think the above proves that we have a knack for knowing good design from bad and subsequently we’ve got a keen eye in spotting amazing design talent. In the past however our collaborations were rather exclusive in that you needed to be invited by us. That’s however changing slightly.

We’ve decided to open up a brand new section of WooThemes: Submit Your Design. So this is your chance to get in on the fun, get paid to work with WooThemes and be featured next to the most popular designers on the web in our portfolio of themes.

We’re hoping that this will spark the next wave of design innovation at WooThemes and we’re looking to make new friends through the upcoming collaborations. So read through the details of this new campaign and if you’ve got some good ideas, definitely send them our way.

The second article about two mainstream news websites in Iowa who have also adopted the WordPress + premium themes approach, just drives the point home: premium / commercial WordPress themes save you both money & time.

Objectively though, I can totally see where this approach fits into the website design & development industry. Coming from my background of doing client design & development work with Radiiate, I can attest to the fact that both the time & cost budgets are much larger in comparison to the budgets you’d need to buy a WooTheme and have it modified by one of our Affiliated Woo Workers (only accessible to our members).

This does come with a proviso though… Sometimes it will be best to get a website custom designed & developed from scratch and a WooTheme won’t be suitable for every need / niche under the sun. But I think our themes collection is becoming more diverse & flexible by the week, so this should at least be a viable option.

I mean – just a quick glance at our Showcase (of user modified WooThemes) shows you how our users are implementing our themes. And I can promise you one thing: none of them had massive custom design & development budgets…

What do you think? Think I’m getting this spot-on or being totally subjective in promoting our products / services?