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.

As mentioned in the video, Jeff spoke at WordCamp Cape Town and that presentation can be found here. I also believe Jeff has his slides posted on his website.

We hope you enjoy getting to know our ninjas a little more. Let us know what you think, or if you have any other questions we should be asking.

Finally, be sure to keep up with Jeffy at the links below.

Twitter | Facebook | Website | Gmail

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.

Hackathons

We’re not big on deadlines & milestones, so our themes have very flexible development timelines – as long as we release two themes a month. What we found though is that the process to get a theme to 95% completed was easy & streamlined, but then the final 5% work – involving final feature inclusions, browser testing, demo setup, bug fixing – took much longer and generally forced us to rush to get it out the door. Rushing towards a deadline means we’re compromising on our time, and we’re probably also missing minor bugs that could’ve been avoided if we weren’t rushed.

Hackathons scheduled in our Basecamp calendar.

To improve on this, we’re now scheduling a hackathon as soon as we get the theme to 95% completion. A hackathon could be 6 hours, or 2 days and during this time the responsible WooTeam members focus all of their time & energy to wrap up the theme ready for release. No one is to bother the team members with other tasks during their hackathon, so there are no distractions which means that the last 5% is completed in a much smoother process.

A by-product of this has been that we’ve actually included additional functionality in both our recent releases (Statua & Editorial) due to the focused time that the guys could spend on both themes during their hack days. Double win.

Teams

A WordPress theme in itself isn’t really big enough to have the 7 developers and designers of the WooTeam working on it at once, because we’d inefficiently be stumbling over each other’s feet. So we’ve all been basically doing our own thing, working on our assigned theme tasks on the to-do lists. This workflow however sometimes results in certain projects not being wrapped up (efficiently or at all), since there’s no one that takes responsibility for the whole project from start to finish.

We are countering this with the use of internal teams. Basically this means that for every theme we create a mini-team, which generally consists of a project lead (who is responsibility for quality assurance & project management), a support ninja (who also does the basic WooFramework integration) and an advanced developer (currently either Matty or Jeff, with Warren to soon start helping out). Every mini-team therefore has the necessary skills to complete the project at hand.

What we’ve seen is that this brings an increased efficiency to our workflow, because the team can now take proper responsibility for their tasks and they can also keep each other accountable. Having 3 people actively working on the same project means a quicker project, and hopefully means we can start building up a backlog of themes to release, buying us more time to work on innovative features for the framework.

Team Comarty creating awesomeness!

Feedback from the guys has also indicated that they enjoy the fact that their little teams almost generate their own identity (Mark, Cobus & Matty recently worked together on Editorial & “branded” their team as Comarty), which results in a closer collaboration. Whilst this is seemingly simple and the idea for teams again isn’t unique, it’s not necessarily something that is so obvious in a small team like ours. Again though, the benefit has been massive.

Do you have any experience with either of these concepts or something similar? What do you do within your teams to boost efficiency & productivity?

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)!

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.

We also had a WooThemes meetup with a fun group of our customers from London, I think it was a great time for everyone there. It was chance for us to meet with some of our users in real life. Another aspect of an online company that is different from normal, we don’t get to meet many of our users. I only wish we could travel more and have face-to-face conversations with more of our customers.

Back to the WooTeam working from one location… One day during our stay in London we took over one of the hotel’s business rooms and got down to work. When we were all handling our normal work activities, nothing was too out of the normal. That is if you don’t count Kirstin and his love for blaring Céline Dion loud enough for us all to hear through his earphones.

Once we got some mail and forum posts out of the way, we had a proper brainstorming session about all of the challenges & ideas we have for WooThemes. This was quite fun to witness. I proposed a couple ideas from my side of Woo, but then the more geeky side took over. I watched as the more technically inclined part of our team dug into what is our core product of themes, and really hashed out ways they – as a team – could become more efficient, as well as produce higher quality themes. From this discussion of the core product we branched off into several great ideas that in due time will be used to improve upon the whole Woo experience.

While this meeting might have gone a bit long, it was clear that this discussion reinvigorated everyone to spend some time and hash out these ideas. This was definitely one of the goals of the trip we talked about before. The conversation even lingered over into our early dinner and throughout the rest of the week. To keep these conversations going we’re implementing many ideas behind the scenes, but to have that chance to brainstorm face-to-face was priceless.

I’m sure we put a bit of a dent in the WooThemes credit card, but for us all to get together and operate as a “normal” company was definitely worth the price. Just as any other company that is together all of the time would say it’s good for them to get away. We’ve definitely grown tighter as co-workers and have come back rejuvenated to lead WooThemes to the next step of innovation. It’ll definitely be great to see the fruits of this trip come to life in the near future.

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.

The reason I even mention this is that we’ve admittedly never been perfect; instead we’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what we could be doing better & improving on those. And even as I type this, I know of a few projects on our radar that needs urgent attention and even more things internally which we’re tackling soon for massive improvements.

The great news though is that we’re fully committed and exceptionally passionate about all the things that we hope to achieve in the next couple of months. Beyond having to trust our skills, experience and efficiency in executing on these aims, you can be assured that we’re fueled by our passion to bring you beautifully designed (WordPress) solutions.

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.

In addition, before this trip we had never met Mike & Ryan, since they’re States-based which is a long way from the rest of us. Suffice to say that these two have had (and will have a few more) their initiation drinks.

2. Downtime

I mentioned in my post earlier this week that most of the time we’re solely focused on working hard and progressing as a team / company, which obviously means that there isn’t much downtime. This trip obviously changes that by allowing us to have some fun and hopefully go back to work refreshed afterwards (at least mentally, considering that we probably won’t be sleeping much).

We’ve realized recently that it is really important for the team to get more downtime and just balance the hard work out a tad. When working online, it is just so easy to get stuck in the same old, daily routines which makes it incredibly hard to break away from being connected all the time.

3. Relationships remain important

We’ve always been very picky in terms of how we’ve grown the WooTeam and who gets to join the team, specifically because we don’t believe that every individual would be well suited to our company. Talent is one thing, but having an unique personality and contributing that to the team is just as important.

As a result we all get along so well and that is incredibly important for the relationships on the team. It goes without saying that improved relationships has a direct, beneficial influence on the efficiency and quality of our internal collaborations which in turn has a massive impact on the products & service we can deliver to our users.

4. Getting to know Woo

We’re not just a company that designs & develops awesome WordPress themes. We are also the WooTeam and we’d like you to get to know us. For us – as a company, brand & team – it is important that you know who you are dealing with; we don’t just want to be a name on your screen.

We believe this is one of the things that sets us apart from other companies: by showing you who we really are, we believe we’re also fostering a relationship with our community that exceeds the default business-client relationship. In turn we hope that this relationship nurtures the trust & loyalty of our community, which empowers us to build a better, stronger WooThemes.

So as you’ll gather, we’re not just in the UK at present for the sake it; instead there is a massive benefit to the WooTeam which we aim to pass onto the WooCommunity as soon as we’re back to work proper. In the meantime, keep following all the fun we’re having.

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. 

Boardroom meetings are a little tricky at WooThemes.

5 days in London for some sightseeing, team building, brainstorming and pint drinking, not to forget the Woo party at Shoreditch House (which has sold out!) then on to Newcastle for the DIBI Conference and the parties around it.

In typical Woo fashion we’ve decided to build a fun little one-page sub-site documenting the trip via all the bragging tweets us geeks will be posting. That after our last trip managed to get some coverage on Mashable.

The sub-site has lots of JS and CSS trickery including a location based Google Map, a live Twitter feed, and our latest photos uploaded to TwitPic. Jeff has managed to use the Twitter API quite extensively, whilst Mark has had lots of fun with the design and UX, as well as creating our own “About the team” map with CSS hovers & tooltips.

Make sure you visit the “Woo in Blighty” site regularly and follow the team members on Twitter. Who knows we might run a promotion or two there.

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…

Along with our great friends, VPS.NET, we’re co-hosting an evening of beers, WordPress, general geekery and all things Woo on Monday, 6 June 2011. The meetup is taking place at The Biscuit Pin at Shoreditch House and it promises to be loads of fun. Where there is a Woo (and beers), there is a way.

Snacks & beers (via a generous bar tab) will be provided; so you only need to bring yourself!

Capacity is limited to only 60 attendees, so if you wanted to join us, you need to act quickly and sign up here. We specifically wanted to keep the meetup small, since we wanted to give you guys & girls the opportunity to spend some quality, one-on-one time with the various WooTeam members (and vice versa). We’d absolutely love to meet our fans / customers and are really excited about sharing this evening with you.

Another bonus – if all goes well – is that we’re hoping to announce an exciting new project collaboration with VPS.NET exclusively at the meetup. Just another reason to sign up now!

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.

We’ve stated before that we’re not keen to simply grow the size of the WooTeam for the sake of it and instead we’re using proper budgets and priorities. Due to that, we’re also hoping that small, incremental improvements in our efficiency would allow us to address the three challenges mentioned above. This is how we hope to achieve that… 

• KISS, MVP & Roadmaps. We’ve always been fans of 37Signals’ KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) attitude, yet we sometimes overcomplicate things to our own detriment. New releases will be focused on the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) concept, which means that a V1 of a new theme might not include every single, spiffy feature imaginable. Instead we will roadmap these spiffy features for iterative V1.1, V1.2, V1,3 etc. releases to speed up the initial release and to allow us to jump between multiple projects.
• Scrumming. We are implementing a weekly scrum (Wikipedia) in our development cycle, which means that – as a WooTeam – we’ll spend more time discussing our various to do’s and finding solutions for problems or new features. We’ll be evaluating all ideas & to do’s according to their “business value” (i.e. how valuable is that to the WooCommunity) & development complexity. This should allow us to prioritize the various to do’s across multiple projects much easier, while also considering ideas from all sources (internally and from WooIdeas).
• Extracting advanced functionality, may result in plugins. We’re exploring ways in which we can make our most advanced functionality more generic and extracting it from specific themes and instead standardize it to work across multiple themes (as a plugin). We will not add out-of-box support for all plugins and all themes, but we’ll make the documentation available for you to do so.

In addition to optimizing our development cycles, we’re hoping that these tweaks will see us adding more value, more efficiently to the WooCommunity either via upgrades to existing themes, better new themes or maybe complimentary products / services that aren’t theme or plugin-related.

What do you think? Sounds promising, right?

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?

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…

• Quality over quantity. Answering a question quickly is something we strive to do, but a question that is perfectly answered the first time is of more value. We’ll rather take 10% longer to respond and then take the extra time to attempt to answer your question completely the first time around.
• Collaboration. Everyone on the WooTeam has a varying development skill-level, with only Jeff & Matty being able to efficiently take care of the most advanced queries. The WooTeam will be working closer together and collaborating to tag-team the difficult tickets and get all users quality feedback as efficiently as possible.
• Accountability. We’ll be implementing some new functionality in the forum soon, whereby a WooTeam member will take responsibility for an individual query and will then be held accountable for providing the user in question with a favourable & efficient response.
• Moderation. We’re attempting to moderate all of the content & exchanges on the forum much more, which should result in the forum becoming more searchable and helpful (without the need to necessarily create a new ticket for every query).
• Help on modifications. You’ll notice that we’re becoming more strict in applying our Support Policy, especially with regards to modifications. We’d like to be as fair as possible to all users and whilst we’d love to help every user with their modifications, we simply can’t do that in a way that is unfair to another user in the WooCommunity. Every user deserves equal time & attention and as a result we’ll only be providing support on very minor modifications (we have the Affiliated Woo Workers & WooJobs to help out with advanced modifications).

Beyond this, we’re working on some initiatives to improve our passive support resources. This means you can expect tweaks to theme documentation and FAQ’s, while we’re also toying with the idea of establishing a WooWiki of sorts and adding contextual theme help to the WordPress Dashboard screens.

What do you think? Anything we’re missing?

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.

It’s About the Relationship

One thing that has always been pretty obvious to us, is that our relationship with each other – both as co-founders and friends – is paramount to the success of WooThemes. We’re not the most talented group of co-founders you’ll find online, but we’ve worked really hard and we’ve worked together (two very important characteristics we believe).

A result of our great relationship has been that our combined personalities have become the voice, image & personality of WooThemes, which means that our business is simply an extension of us. By making sure that our relationship is our most important asset – and not compromising on those by forcing a 2 vs 1 vote down someone’s throat – we’ve built a flourishing business which we absolutely love.

You’d think that after working together for 3+ years now, there’d be a few fights at least, yet we’ve quite easily navigated our way through potentially sticky situations by not invoking majority voting. Yes – sometimes this means discussions are drawn-out and decisions take a little while longer to make, but it also means we’re protecting our biggest asset: the team & our relationship.

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:

1. Ryan is an unique individual. He wasn’t scared to put himself – as a person and not just a CV – out there and *really* apply for the job. Things could’ve just as well worked out differently if we didn’t like the video or the person it featured, but the video was the closest to a real-life “interview” we could’ve had with Ryan. We loved how he wasn’t afraid to be himself and how he communicated that in a really unique & awesome way.
2. The passion was evident. Have you ever made a video to persuade a company to hire you? Probably not (I haven’t either)… But Ryan invested a lot of energy to get the job, which makes us think he badly wants the job and would thus make a good addition to the WooTeam.

We’ve hired many different people in the past and none of them made a “Hire Me WooThemes”-page or video and that was fine too, because we could judge their individualism & passion in a completely different way. With Ryan though, these made a big difference to our decision.

Hiring for Passion & Individualism

Ryan has only been in the job for a week and from early evidence we’ve just added an immense asset to the WooTeam. We thus believe that our focus on hiring an unique & passionate individual has already paid off and will continue to be a great contributing factor to our continued growth.

Here’s a couple o reasons for you to value passion & individualism in your own hiring decisions:

• Avoid clones / robots. There’s a balance to be struck in the composition of every team and generally we’ve firmly avoided having clones and robots on the team. The  beauty of the WooTeam is that we’re 10 very different individuals with a shared passion, interest & goal (WooThemes & everything that includes).
• Thinking for yourself. The last thing we want is to micro-manage anyone on the WooTeam. Instead we want everyone to take their own initiative, have an opinion on how things should be working and thus contributing their unique value. If we just had employees who echoed the personalities of the co-founders, our ideas would never be challenged and, as a company, we’d probably never evolve.
• Passion breeds so much value. When you’re passionate about something you don’t mind working hard and ideas (which is the cornerstone of innovation & evolution) are pretty easy to come by too. In addition to that, WooThemes tries to be a very user-centric company and our passion to deliver amazing experiences to our users (both via our products and our interactions with the WooCommunity) and passion is thus very easily translated in this way.

We hope that you can see these characteristics in your interactions with the WooTeam and we are excited to have Ryan being our evangelist in communicating this to the WooCommunity.

What do you think? Is this all smoke & mirrors? Or are we actually walking this talk?

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…

Hardware:

• MacBook Pro
• 22 inch external LCD
• Logi-tech wireless keyboard mouse combo – ‘cos those Apple keyboards are too small for me
• iPad for forum/email support at home

The Woo Workstation

Software

General Development

• Coda – I cannot even describe how much I enjoy Coda, it just works and doesn’t crash! Plus it has FTP and Terminal all in one so it suits me great!
• WordPress syntax mode plugin for Coda is great for when you can’t remember your WordPress functions.
• I use SVNx for a general overview of our SVN repositories, but I use terminal most of the time anyway for SVN tasks – the other guys use Versions as they don’t need to be using Terminal or SSH.
• I use MAMP Pro for its customizability, but you can get by with just regular MAMP though.
• My main WordPress setup is a single WordPress install with NetWork enabled, and a site for each theme with each having its own unique content.
• I test using Firefox, Safari, and Chrome – frontend design testing is done by the frontend guys so I don’t need IE (thank goodness).

WordPress Specific Settings

• I generally like a clean WordPress install, however I’ve decided to trial these 2 debug plugins, Debug Bar and Debug Bar Console. They give you a nice overview of what’s going on under the hood of your WordPress install and could be usefully for optimization.
• Other than that, you can follow the WordPress debug settings, and/or I generally have the following debug setting enabled though:
  

But basically I spend most of my day in Coda writing/upgrading/fixing logic in our themes and plugins, or reading forum support threads.

And that’s the life of a WooThemes developer! What do you have in your “batbelt”?

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…

A Message from Ryan

Hi everyone,

Like the short video says, I’m Ryan. It’s an honour to be WooTheme’s new community manager. I can’t tell you how excited I am to work with you all and the WooTeam. I was literally shaking with excitement when I received the email! I’ve been a big fan of WooThemes and the work they do. I’ve been a member since they released a theme called Papercut. Seems like so long ago when I first started tinkering with their themes, and now I’m working with them. It’s hard to believe this is a reality.

None the less I’m here to help the wonderful WooCommunity. I’m going to try and make everyone’s life a little easier. I know I’ve got a lot to learn, and a lot of people to meet but I’m ready! I’ll be here to answer any questions you have regarding themes, the theme club, theme support, WooIdeas, etc… I’ll be hanging around most of the day answering emails and connecting you with the support you need, as well as making that support easier to get. It’s going to be great.

Feel free to contact me anytime. Whether you are happy sad, mad or glad, I’ll try and answer your requests the best I can and keep the great WooThemes support and customer service going. Thanks.

By the way, this video took over 26 takes.

What can you expect?

Your Community Manager

We’ve hired Ryan to fill a gap between you – the WooCommunity – and the WooTeam. We want to interact with you more, find out what’s bugging you, or on your mind, and how we can improve your experience in & around WooThemes.

You would’ve seen a recurring theme (excuse the pun) from us in the last couple of months: we’ve tried to add as much value around here as possible. The days of just releasing new themes (regardless of how incredibly awesome they are) are long gone and we’re now very focused on making sure that all of your interactions and experiences with Woo is WOW! Simple as that.

You will therefore be seeing Ryan interacting with you via e-mail, here on the blog, as well as on our social media channels. In addition to the way the WooTeam already interacts, you’ll see Ryan’s name & gravatar popping onto your radar regularly. When that does happen, don’t treat Ryan as a stranger, but regard him as your new best friend.

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.

A Few Thoughts from Chris

We asked Chris a couple of questions about working with us and here’s what he had to say (divulge)…

Why do you like designing for WooThemes / working with the WooTeam?

I think one of the main reasons is that i’m working with a group of like-minded people. Often in the past I’ve worked with clients who have very little or no knowledge of web development. Explaining the simplest of things can turn out to be quite a time consuming and frustrating task. Working with the WooTeam has been a pleasure throughout, it’s been such a simple and hassle free process every time I’ve worked on a theme.

How does designing for WooThemes (and designing themes) differ from other client work?

It’s quite a contrast when you compare the two. Client work is often done in a controlled manner, with guidelines being set so the end design meets the clients spec / requirements. Theme design is usually the opposite, it tends to be a case of selecting what sort of theme needs to be designed (e.g. business) and then having full creative freedom on it.

Elefolio: Blogging + Tumblogging + Portfolio + Dribbble

What has been your favourite design so far?

I’d have to say Spectrum. When I originally started designing it, it kind of set out to be a version 2 of Gotham News which I’d wanted to do for quite a while. As it progressed it evolved into more of a image based news theme, due to it being a little bit different to the norm I think this is what’s helped it become a pretty good seller.

How does it feel to be the first “honorary member” of the WooTeam?

A true privilege. To me WooThemes is easily the biggest and most recognised WordPress theme selling company out there, to become not just an honorary member but also the first one is a great feeling. Having been able to design the themes I have so far has been a great experience for me so I thank the WooTeam for giving me that chance.

Next up: Food Magazine

The design that finally lead to us inking this new collaboration, is the design for one of our next releases, Food Magazine. It’s a new magazine-style theme – done by Chris obviously – which has a little niche focus: food. Below is a little teaser…

Delicious...

Before signing off, we need to mention that all aspiring designers out there, can take note of how Chris has evolved as a designer and to such an extent that he is now a honorary member of the WooTeam. You can do the same by submitting your designs to us here.

Meet Michael Krapf, WooNinja

You would’ve noticed in the last couple of months that we’ve been focusing on one recurring topic: more value for existing users. And with this latest announcement, we’re hoping to further build on that strategy in the hope that all WooUsers will find even more value & pleasant experiences within the WooCommunity.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve noticed that the forum is being pounded by more & more support requests as the WooUsers kept modifying, tweaking and breaking (!) our themes at an alarming rate. Because this is however our exact aim with our themes (they’re meant to be customized), we figured there was only one way to improve support in this regard: hire another WooNinja.

So with that, we’d like to welcome the newest addition to the WooTeam, Michael Krapf, who will be helping out Tiago, Kirstin & the rest of the WooTeam in making our support function an even better experience!

Meet Michael

Michael has been working with WooThemes for quite a while now and has been an active community member (especially in terms of helping out other WooUsers on the forum) since the very beginning. Having become quite a prominent figure in the WooCommunity, Michael also became an Affiliated Woo Worker shortly thereafter and established himself as an extremely valuable resource for the WooUsers that chose to work with him.

As we’ve always preferred growing the WooTeam from within the business and community, Michael was the perfect candidate to help us out in terms of supporting the WooUsers in an official capacity.

Michael absolutely loves Canvas and has handled quite a few client projects built on top of it; so you’ll most definitely be able to find him answering a few Canvas-related queries on the forum.

With that, we’d like to welcome Michael for one last time and we hope that you’ll soon have the opportunity of interacting with Michael. We also hope that your experience(s) with WooThemes will just continue to grow & improve.

Today we reveal one of our biggest secrets yet.

So how did we do this? I’d like to believe that we’ve always allowed our team to grow from within. For example, prior to Cobus & Fox joining the team, they were working with me on a side-project (radiiate) – so I had known them both and even though it was with a difference, they grew into more prominent positions.

In a similar vein, Tiago started out as a (junior) support / forum ninja and grew into the position of Master Ninja in our support forums, whilst also becoming our lead (and only at the moment) Drupal developer. Kirstin too started out as a (junior) forum ninja, turned into an Affiliated Woo Worker and we’ve now also released some of his designs as themes on WooThemes. The latest feather in Kirstin’s cap is the upcoming release of Coda, which Kirstin both designed & developed.

Our Strategy

We’re firm believers in organic growth and even more so with trust, friendships & relationships. As a result, we’ve always preferred to establish relationships and work with the people that we know best.

By allowing everyone within the WooTeam to grow into their own niche positions has been hugely beneficial, as we’ve been fortunate to fill much-needed gaps this way. To date the only gap we filled from outside our circle, has been the addition of Jeff (last November). Since Jeff joined the team though, he has carved out his own position and he is now doing stuff (and hence adding value) that we were never able to do before (as is evidenced by his development of the WooNav and ultimate contribution to the WordPress 3.0 core).

So next time when you look at your team, consider what we’ve done to grow our team organically. Not only has this growth strategically made the most sense to us, but it also means that the whole WooTeam is one helluva tight-knit group (which has its own obvious benefits).

More about our journey here.

The post includes our journey in establishing WooThemes, growing it organically without VC funding and facing the challenges that are associated with a team that is based remotely.