All the latest news and announcements, straight from the WooThemes HQ!
Reporting for Duty
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15. Mar, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
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…
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Behind-the-Scenes: How we use Basecamp
22. Dec, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in 5 Minutes With Woo
Our Active Projects
As you know, the WooTeam is located all across the world; so managing all of our activities effectively, and making sure that we’re all on (approximately) the same page at all times, is quite a challenge. To help us lighten the management-load a bit, we – just like most other web-savvy geeks – use Basecamp to track our daily activities & tasks on one, easy-to-access platform.
So we wanted to give you a bit of an overview of how we use Basecamp for internal management, as well as interacting with all of our outside collaborators. At any given time, we’re interacting with 10 – 20 different people, on different areas of our business, with different WooTeam members in charge of managing the respective processes. It is thus quite challenging at times, but I’d like to think that we have a solid system in place, which has allowed us to keep most of the important things on the radar.
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Keep On Growing
23. Nov, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
If you’ve ever been involved in the startup life; you’d know that life can get pretty frenetic at times. And after a long, yet exciting year we’re happy to announce that we’ve grown our team once again to continue fueling the immense growth we’ve experienced this year.
The latest member of our team is Kirstin Pauk, who has joined Tiago Noronha as part of our support team. Kirstin who is one of our leading Affiliated Woo Workers, brings a wealth of experience (in hacking, breaking & fixing our themes back up) to the table and we truly believe that all of our users will find this latest addition to the team to be very valuable indeed.
The Ever-Growing WooTeam... From left to right: Mark, Cobus, Magnus, Fox, Jeff & Adii.
So our relative “silence” from last week is a thing off the past, since we’re all rested after the whole WooTeam (except for Tiago unfortunately) met up in Cape Town for some R&R. We even managed to do a little photoshoot to show you how pretty we all are… 
This means that it is back to the grindstone for us. Jeff is starting his new job on Monday, so we’ll be back to full compliment then. We still plan on bringing you some new awesomeness, before we close the curtains on 2009.
In Need of a Ninja
10. Nov, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
Helping our users with technical issues, along with providing them with modification advice is something we value highly at WooThemes. At the moment we have Tiago who is doing a stellar job of handling most of the support, along with Magnus, whilst the rest of the WooTeam jumps in when necessary.
But as the company has grown, we continue to need more hands on board when it comes to providing a top-notch support environment to our users. So that’s why we’re dipping into the talent pool again, in search of a support ninja to work with Tiago & Magnus to continue providing amazing help to our users.
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The WooTeam Grows
26. Oct, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
A desk at Woo HQ: Not empty anymore...
A month ago we set out to expand the WooTeam and add another developer to our ranks. Today we can announce that the new, awesome developer that will be joining our team on 1 December, is a talented, local (South Africa) developer that goes by the name of Jeffrey Pearce.
We’re extremely excited to have Jeff on board and we’re already brainstorming quite a few new ideas that we’ll be pursuing in the new year. Jeff brings a fresh set of eyes & ideas to the table and he’ll be working closely with Foxinni on stuff related to our WooFramework backend, some advanced additions to our themes and then a few things that we won’t share for now (we don’t want any of the bad boys copying us).
So for now… Welcome to Jeff! And to the rest of you: watch this space.
We’re Hiring
21. Sep, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
Having 6 full-time members on the WooTeam doesn’t seem to be enough to continue fueling our growth… So we’ve decided to look for a talented developer to join our team… I mean: stagnating ain’t that much fun and we have some seriously cool themes to release in the next few months.
So this is the “job description” we’ve also posted over at Authentic Jobs:
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Simon North joins the WooTeam
11. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
At this stage, WooThemes is like a teenage boy that just chows through stacks of food to fuel their immense growth. This means that we needed to expand our team (yet again) to fuel the next phase of our growth.
So I’d like to take a quick few minutes to welcome Simon North to the WooTeam. Simon joins our support team (aka becomes a WooNinja), where he’ll be helping out our forum master, Tiago Noronha, with day-to-day customer support. Simon is initially joining us for 2 months and if everything runs smooth & dandy, he’ll join our team on a permanent basis.
This move allows Magnus to spend a bit more time developing themes, and at the same time should increase our resources available to improve our support offering even further. We believe that WOO2 will surely showcase a progression in our support resources and we’re sure that all of our customers will be very pleased indeed!
Fresh Fox in the house
26. Feb, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
It’s incredible to think that we’ve actually managed to contain our excitement and delay the announcement of this news for almost 6 weeks now… I’m actually pretty proud of us, considering how massive this news is. So let’s get to the story then…
In the middle of January, we were approached by an extremely big multi-national corporate about possibly acquiring WooThemes. It was only a preliminary meeting for the company to guage our interest in a possible deal, but the figures and details were pretty concrete. Without mentioning any figures, I can however divulge that offer was very lucrative and it made us think twice. BUT – I believe we made the correct decision in declining the offer, based on quite a few business / personal reasons.
The main positive to come out of the meeting though, was the fact that we were obviously moving in a direction, where we have a much more mainstream appeal and audience. So to pursue this, we have decided to add 2 members to our core development team… WooThemers, please meet and say welcome to FRESH01 & Foxinni.
I have known both of these guys for quite some time now and we’ve been working together on custom design / development projects at Radiiate. As of 1 March, they will however (virtually) move over to WooThemes and our Radiiate offices in Cape Town, South Africa will become the semi-WooThemes HQ (because every Rockstar needs an HQ).
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WooThemes? Who?
24. Aug, 2008 by Adii Rockstar in Interactive
I guess it’s always nice to know the company you are dealing with (or considering to deal with whilst scoping out their products), as that kind of information can either make you feel more comfortable with your purchase or make you run for the hills.
I was lucky enough to do a presentation on premium WordPress themes – with the focus on what we’re doing at WooThemes – at yesterday’s WordCamp South Africa, where Matt Mullenweg (WordPress founder) was also present.
So if you’re keen to get a bit of an inside view of where & what WooThemes is at the moment and also where we’re planning on heading, you should read this summary of my presentation. I’ve uploaded the slides of my presso and also written up as much as I can remember of what I said. Hope it makes sense and makes your decision to possibly join us in future much easier!
WooThemes Launched!
09. Jul, 2008 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
We are so happy to announce the launch of our brand-spanking new, WordPress Themes Club & Store. WooThemes is officially the evolution of our older Premium News Themes offering; and in our opinion is a massive improvement to what we previously had to offer… Here’s a bit of a run-down on the new features that we’ve released with WooThemes’ Launch:
The WooThemes Club
Along with the new theme, we’ve decided to establish a new subscription-based club membership system for all WooThemes customers. The idea with the themes club was to give all users a wider variety of choices of our themes, along with the ability to change their current theme when we release newer themes. Our least expensive options starts at $150 USD for three months, which at the moment entitles you to all 10 of our themes, along with all the themes we’ll release in the three months after your subscription.
Fancy some access to all of our themes? Read more about the themes club here…
New Themes
We have released two brand new themes… The first is a business-targeted theme called VibrantCMS, which was designed by Adii. The most prominent feature of the theme is that of the scroller on the frontpage, where the idea is that the user should “sell” his / her products / services to the reader.
The second new theme is ProudFolio by new member, Elliot Jay Stocks. The theme is a combination of a portfolio and blog; and the backend dynamically creates these two different “sections” within your WordPress installation. ProudFolio is targeted at designers, photographers, artists etc that would like to showcase their work, along with adding blog functionality to their site.
More New Stuff
There’s really too much to blog about, so we’ll continue to highlight some of the features of WooThemes in upcoming blog posts… In the meantime, you can have a look at our new theme features, enhanced affiliate program & improved theme support center.
