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!

Web Designer Magazine - Issue 155

That’s right Issue 155 of Web Designer Magazine features us yet again, but this time we have a more prominent feature with a full page dedicated to a Q & A with Adii and a look at the WooThemes headquarters in Cape Town, South Africa.

Issue 155 focuses on WordPress’s impressive and biggest upgrade to date - version 2.7. The magazine features explanations of this version’s highlights, the dashboard editor explained and designer tips and opinions.

We’ve teamed up with Web Designer Magazine and launched three of our popular WooTheme wordpress templates for free on their promotional CD.

That’s about £200′s worth of WooThemes goodness!

Which themes are available on the CD you may ask?

One from each of us. Adii’s Geometric business/portfolio theme, Magnus’s Freshfolio portfolio theme and my magazine theme – Foreword Thinking.

Head on over to your local UK newspaper shop to get your copy or buy this issue online.

Take a tour of WooThemes HQ

• Part 1
• Part 2

Note: Magnus was excluded from the interview, because he couldn’t get his butt down to Cape Town in time…

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.