The WooThemes Blog

Earlier this week I was staring at my computer screen, looking at a blank WordPress post page, trying to figure out what the headline for the release post of our latest theme, Statua, would be. This was admittedly a hard task.

I eventually settled for “To All Photographers: Meet Statua”, which is one of the ideas that didn’t seem too stupid or repulsed me.

The thing is that I know I could’ve done something simple. Maybe something like “Statua V1.0 Released”. That’s clear, concise and communicates what the post is about: we have released a new theme called Statua. Simple. It is however also boring as hell.

We don’t do boring. It’s never been one of our brand attributes to be boring and we’re definitely not gonna start being mundane with the headlines of our blog posts either. I regularly laugh at myself for the headlines that I end up using for blog posts, because there are some really silly one’s in there. But at least they’re not boring. And some of them are even quite quirky I’d think.

Continue Reading »

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…

Continue Reading »

WooVille has become a really popular feature since we introduced it towards the end of last year.

Initially we thought that it’d just be fun to share a bit of behind-the-scenes insight into the inner workings  of the WooTeam, whilst also generating some traffic to the site (this was probably our main motivation to start this up). Since the first WooVille went live though, we’ve found that the series has been a great addition to our workflow for a couple of reasons…

We hope you get to know us better. Sometimes joking about oneself is the best way to kinda be honest and share insight into who you are. And that’s what we’re attempting with WooVille: it’s not meant to be corporate, but instead it should give you an idea of who we are and how we work. We think that our customers enjoy the fact that they know who is behind the computer, the e-mails they receive, support tickets being answered and themes being released. It’s just our way of making sure we’re as personal as possible. 

Continue Reading »

How do you know that your products work the way they are intended? You use them yourself.

We’re firm believers in using our own products, which means that exactly the same WooFramework that goes into our themes, is the one that WooThemes.com has been built on and is powered by. We believe that this best communicates our trust in the themes that we develop, and makes for a healthy marketing campaign.

Three examples of us actually using our own stuff:

• We recently hired Ryan as our new community manager and we used our jobs board (the theme is not ours, but we’ll save that for another blog), WooJobs, to advertise the position and handle the applications. We got 34 top applications in the space of 4 days and managed to hire an incredibly talented individual to the WooTeam in less than a week.
• The WooThemes Showcase has been using a slightly modified version of Snapshot (a free theme we released back in the day). The Showcase these days features almost 1500 awesome modifications of our themes and is still running strongly (probably due to the continuous improvements that has gone into the WooFramework which powers Snapshot).
• For our Express iPhone App marketing we use a modded version of our Apz theme to showcase it’s features and act as a sales tool.

There isn’t a much better testimonial than that, is there? 

Continue Reading »

We’ve always believed in being open and honest about the things we’re working on, the stuff that excites us, as well as the times when we’ve messed up. Sharing the good stuff is easy, but publishing about a major delay (and general crappy situations) isn’t as easy…

It’s not just about publishing blog posts either; by admitting to a screw-up via e-mail is just as hard. If we had a choice, we’d want to be perfect in every situation, and would prefer all of our users to be oblivious to the mistakes.

Eliminating mistakes completely (as a company) is impossible and trying to contain them / keep them secret is an exercise of volatile PR. We’d rather not even try that… Instead we believe that these kind of things are better said and admitted to, than just ignored, and figuratively speaking – a layer of wallpaper stuck on to cover the crack in the wall. We have found the WooCommunity to be appreciative of our transparency in this regard.

Continue Reading »

We’re sure that – unless our customers are incredibly unique – your customers have pretty loud voices & strong opinions. Especially when they’re pissed off, right?

We’ve found that our users are much better at telling us when they’re not happy with, and when we’re not doing something right, whilst the positive stuff is just silently enjoyed. This means that unless we look at things holistically, it would be easy to get a skewed view of our user perception. It is however a well-known (online) fact that people that complain, do so very loudly, whilst compliments are a tad harder to find.

Beyond our ego’s and the feel-good factor of knowing our users are happy, there’s a different challenge to this situation: the decisions we make. If we make every decision based on the “unhappy voices”, we’re probably alienating the silent, but happy majority of our users that don’t want us to make decisions that will change anything / everything. Magnus said it best recently:

Continue Reading »

If you trying to sell a product or service we’re pretty sure that you would’ve read a lot of articles, both online and offline that talk about marketing campaigns and customer acquisitions, because these things are obviously the only way for you to grow your business and client base? Wrong!

Most marketing campaigns are focused externally and geared to market to prospective new customers. More customers = More revenue. But there’s also a much more lucrative marketing angle that you are forgetting: marketing to your existing customer base, and getting them to spend money with you again, again & again.*

Continue Reading »

We’ve always believed that it is important for WooThemes – as a brand, company & community – to have a prominent, united & unified voice in terms of all of our external & internal communications. In this regard, we’ve thus been building & refining this voice since the very first day that WooThemes launched and we believe that after 2-odd years of this, we’ve become very good at this.

Having a brand or company voice means (this is our interpretation) that we are consistent in what we say, what we promote and the value we add across the board. I think it’s amazing that we are able to interact with existing & prospective users in such a way that has almost become expected from us, because we have associated great core values such as reliability, efficiency & uniqueness with the way we conduct our business. So when we release a new theme, you know that you can trust the quality & awesomeness thereof.

Continue Reading »

Since our beginning we’ve opted for a very simple strategy: maximize both value & revenue for every single WooThemes customer.

This means that we are constantly looking at ways in which we can improve your experience over & above the purchases you have already made with us. So it’s kinda saying that you make the decision to buy X from us, but we’ll give you X + 10.

And this approach obviously has a knock-on effect: we create more loyal users who spend money with us more regularly. This is both profitable and it allows us to repeat the process of re-investing in value additions which we don’t necessarily get paid for (directly).

Try this in your business.

A quick Google search would tell you that the idea of great customer service being marketing is most definitely not a new one. In recent months however, we’ve started to truly see the power of valuing excellent customer service…

We get a slew of e-mails every day and most of them are our own imperfect doings (i.e. our themes do at times have bugs, user accounts are sometimes exposed to glitches, and our website isn’t always as clear as it could be). The tone in these emails normally ranges between being neutral and being negative; and we have thus learned that the only way to counter these imperfections is via truly valuing our users and giving the best possible customer service experience.

Continue Reading »

So we’re finally back at the office after our week-long “mobile officing extreme” trip to the slopes, which was indeed an amazing time for the WooTeam. If you had been following us, you’d know that there was much fun & good times to be had…

This means that we’re all refreshed and ready to rock again. We gathered some amazing ideas via all of the discussions on the trip, fueled by much Jagermeister, and we’re looking forward to roll those out in the coming months.

But first up, you can expect the release of CityGuide, which should be going out later this week. The theme is basically ready to go, and has been thoroughly beta-tested, so it’s just a matter of wrapping up the little bits & pieces and then releasing what we expect to be another hit. Thereafter we have a few more surprises (these will definitely include these two designs which we teased last week), but I’ll leave it at that…

Continue Reading »

Ever since we started WooThemes, we’ve been absolutely fascinated with top notch design and we’d like to believe that this focus has been evident throughout all of our activities (from our themes, to the user experience on our site, our content and also our marketing campaigns). This should also be fairly obvious when you consider the amount of amazing web designers we’ve collaborated with, plus we’re always harping on about how awesome our designs are anyway…

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).

Continue Reading »

We really love and nurture our WooThemes brand.  It would be ignorant for us to ignore how proper branding & marketing have helped us to create the WooThemes that we are today. Maybe it’s because we’re a creatively-focused bunch, which when mixed with some (hopefully) shrewd business decision-making, you get a proper, longer term strategy that can prove to be sustainable for the brand.

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…).

Continue Reading »

A while back I published a post entitled “8 Ways to Guarantee Steady, Incoming Traffic” and a little over two months later, we still find ourselves implementing the exact same strategies in attracting traffic to our website. The great thing about this strategy is the fact it has resulted in a constant 10%+ month-to-month traffic increase for WooThemes. So it actually works.

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…

Continue Reading »

Over at WooThemes we’ve released our fair share of free WordPress themes in the last couple of months and we’ve even dabbled in the odd free web icon set as well. And the reasons behind these freebies are simple: 1) we like to give back to the community; and 2) it is a great marketing tool.

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.

Continue Reading »

In the past few months, we’ve been trying a few different marketing strategies to increase the incoming traffic to WooThemes (including WooCamp & The Showcase of course) and we found that by far the hardest part of that is to ensure that the traffic comes in constantly and consistently i.e. not peaking every 2 weeks and then just flattening out.

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…

Continue Reading »