The WooThemes Blog

You may know who WooThemes is and what it is we do, but you probably don’t know much about each individual ninja. We’re hoping to change that now with a video series we’re calling, “Getting To Know Woo.”

This was an idea I had to not only show off our genius ninjas, but as a consumer I also like to see the people behind the company. This is our attempt at opening ourselves up a little more, and having some fun while we’re at it. I know Adii talks and blogs a lot about how WooThemes as a business is run, now let’s meet the people behind the themes, plugins, designs, and all the WooThemes goodness.

Our first brave guinea pig is Jeff. Checkout our interview below. Apologies if you have a hard time hearing, our audio will be better for the next one.

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In our continuous effort to improve the way we work, we’ve recently implemented two new concepts in our workflow: hackathons & teams.

Before I share the details of these concepts, I need to provide some context. Basically when we started WooThemes 3+ years ago, Mark, Magnus & I did so without any type of “best practice” programming background, which meant that we were simply doing whatever us novice programmers thought yielded the best result. As we’ve grown up, those initial days and workflows have become part of our core processes and routines, which made us a very well-oiled machine.

As time has gone on though, and as the team has grown, we’ve realized that whilst our existing workflow obviously isn’t broken, it could definitely do with some improvements. Improvements in turn means increased efficiency & value for the WooCommunity.

So with that in mind, we’d like to share the two things that we’ve recently implemented that has already made a huge difference to how we work. Neither is groundbreaking or unique in its own right, but the benefits we’ve experienced already at least justifies a blog post.

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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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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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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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When we first launched WooThemes, it was only the 3 co-founders on the WooTeam, which meant that most decisions could happen pretty quickly, efficiently and without having to involve a massive team with varying opinions. 3 decision makers also seems to be a perfect situation in that no decisions will be caught up in a “draw”.

We have however never enforced a 2 vs 1 situation that is sometimes just natural when 3 individuals have to make a decision. Instead we’ve preferred to spend more time discussing our decisions and whilst it would be impossible for all 3 of us to be similarly passionate about each decision, we at least want everyone to feel comfortable with the suggested decision(s).

There thus is no majority vote at WooThemes and we’ve never used the 2 vs 1 situation to force a decision through. This just isn’t the way we do business.

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Last week we hired Ryan to be our new Community Manager after receiving more than 30 amazing applications for the position. Generally these decisions are pretty hard to make, because comparing CV’s is probably not the most efficient way of deciding between 30-odd candidates. There was however 2 characteristics which made Ryan an obvious choice for the WooTeam (something which was also evident in our 2 other short-listed candidates): individualism & passion.

Ryan created a whole “Hire me WooThemes” page, which included an incredible video – which he shot & edited himself – to sway our opinion and hire him instead of the other candidates. So sure – we realize that not every candidate had Ryan’s videography skills and it goes without saying that our decision to hire was obviously not made as a result of his videography skills (as this itself doesn’t – yet – seem to be a beneficial asset to the WooTeam), but heck did that video sway our decision-making so much…

But, what’s in a video? We’ve obviously never met Ryan, which makes our hiring process a tad more complicated since we can’t actually have a sit-down and judge the character of the person applying. But with the video we could see two things:

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Developer Tools, the “batbelt” of developers everywhere, generally stirs up conversations telling you about what you should and shouldn’t use. However, I’ve always had a different take on it, I change my toolset based on the work that I’m doing. When I was a .NET developer I worked on Windows and in Visual Studio. With WordPress and PHP development, I’m not going to use those tools as I don’t have to.

So having said all that, I’m going to tell you what works for me and in general I try to use the bare minimum to get stuff done here at WooThemes. With so much code to write, I don’t want a million apps and settings to go by – I just want to login, write code, and deploy.

So here’s my setup…

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A couple of days ago, we invited you to apply for the new Community Manager position on the WooTeam (via WooJobs of course). Fast forward two days and we’re happy to announce that we’ve found the perfect person to fill this gap already. Everyone, meet Ryan Cannon Ray.

We had great applications from some people that we see active in the WooCommunity on a daily basis, and as a result this was a really, really hard choice. Ryan however went the extra mile in getting our attention (the video is a must-see) and we absolutely loved the individualism that he broadcast, which made him a perfect candidate in our opinion.

So as of today, we welcome Ryan to the WooTeam as the first-ever Community Manager. We’re excited to see the value that he contributes to both the WooTeam & WooCommunity.

Since all of us don’t know Ryan all that well yet, we asked him to introduce himself…

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Ever since the birth of WooThemes (more than 3 years ago now), we’ve never been afraid to ask for some outside help and this has seen us collaborating with some really well-known designers. We’d like to think that these guys & girls represent the best of the best.

In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be continuing this legacy by collaborating with the likes of Cameron Moll, Matthew Smith & Orman Clark, which obviously means that you can expect some extreme awesome on the design-front.

We’ve done this, because this obviously helps out with the capacity in terms of designing new stuff, but also supplements our own design work in keeping the styles & ideas fresh. One of our collaborative designers that has become more prominent in recent months, has been Chris Rowe, who we just recently worked with on themes such as Elefolio, Air & Spectrum. These designs (themes) have all proved to be very popular, which has resulted in us taking our collaboration with Chris to a new level.

Spectrum is now our 14th best-selling theme of all-time

Chris has signed up to become an honorary member of the WooTeam for the next couple of months, which will see him working on at least 6 new designs for us. Our decision in this regard was easy based on the quality of Chris’ design work and we’re hoping that we can leverage the relationship we’ve built to improve our future collaborative designs even further.

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